


Heartlines

by andtheblueberrymuffins



Series: Like Real People Do [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (normal hurt/comfort in later chapters), Angst, Attempted Sexual Assault, Clones, DOES NOT GET VERY FAR, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Original Character Death(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Plot, Post-Season/Series 03, Slow Build, Trauma, lion swapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2018-12-26 12:03:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 62,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12058623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheblueberrymuffins/pseuds/andtheblueberrymuffins
Summary: After months of searching, Shiro has finally found his way back to the Castle of Lions, but nothing is quite how he remembers it. Everyone looks at him like they're seeing a ghost, for one thing....Or: the conclusion to the 'Like Real People Do' series, where the fallout from the Galra Empire's experiments with human cloning nearly destroys everything the team has worked so hard to build. Takes place directly after the end of 'Survivor's Rites.'





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we are, the final piece in this series. Probably going to update more slowly, as I don't have this one finished like the other two. But maybe not! We'll see. Anyway, thanks for coming along with me so far!

Shiro hesitates at the White Lion’s door, thinking seriously about pinching himself. 

After all these months, he has finally found the others and it… it feels like it might not be real. He’s had this dream so many times, he’s played this situation out over and over again, and, for a beat, he fears that when he walks down there the Castle will dissolve around him.

He does not want to wake up back on the other side of the universe.

Not without the rest of the team.

The hesitation will get him nowhere. He has come this far. He takes a deep breath and schools his expression into something calm. He wants to be normal, when they see him again for the first time. He wants this to be a good thing. Happy. He walks down the ramp, trying to hide the wild pound of his heart, the nerves coiled in his stomach.

The world does not dissolve.

He steps down and for a crystalline moment time seems to stop as he looks at them. The others are all there—alive, and how many nights did he torment himself wondering if they would be hurt or killed because he wasn’t there to look after them? God, but he’s missed them. Feared for them.

His gaze settles on Allura, the only one who is not as he remembered and imagined. She’s wearing a Paladin’s uniform, all in pink. She stands by Black’s paw, and as he smiles at her she sways sideways. The blood drains from her face, and her eyes widen. She looks like she saw a ghost. They all do. But that’s to be expected. He’s been gone for so long. He has no idea what they found when he disappeared. They must have thought… well. 

He shoves down all the thoughts eating at his mind, and says, the words rehearsed and still coming out wrong, “Finally, I found you.”

Allura makes a tiny sound, hurt, and her fingers curl against Black’s paw. 

The others all move towards her, closing around her. They have their bayards in hand, which is… well. They must have been worried, before they realized who he was. That’s understandable. Normal. “I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything earlier,” Shiro explains, stepping away from the White Lion. “A lot of his systems are unfinished, including communications, and—”

“Hey, hey, stop, okay?” Lance says, after cutting a nervous look at the others. “Stay over there, okay? What are—what do we do? About this? Princess?”

Shiro blinks, confused. He takes another step and says, “Guys, is something—”

Keith activates his bayard. His face has gone deathly pale and his mouth is nothing but a compressed line. He takes a deliberate step to stand between Shiro and Allura. He says, “He has a Galra arm.”

Maybe this _is_ a nightmare. Shiro’s smile withers. He doesn’t understand what’s going on and something cold is spreading through his chest. He fights to keep his voice calm. “Yes, I do. You know I do. I had it when I left.”

“Lotor must have sent him,” Keith says, and the words just don’t make sense.

Shiro says, “Look, no one sent me. I’ve been trying to find you for months. I don’t even know who Lotor is. Can everyone take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on?”

“But he flew a Lion,” Hunk says, sturdy, dependable Hunk, who doesn’t seem to have heard anything Shiro said. “I mean, that’s got to prove something, right?”

“That’s not one of _our_ Lions,” Pidge says, and she’s—she’s taller than she was, when he left. Seeing her again is like a welcome breath of fresh air in this madness.

Shiro tries to shrug all of the weirdness off. He can get everyone back on script. He knows how this is supposed to go. He imagined it so many times. He moves forward, saying, “Katie, listen, I found—”

Keith cuts him off, falling into an aggressive pose, his eyes shining even as his expression shuts down. “Don’t. Move. Again.”

“The Black Lion recognized him,” Allura says, speaking for the first time. She sounds like she’s going to be ill. She is staring at him, her eyes wet and her face ashen. She has not blinked at all, as near as he can see. “She wanted to go to him. She still wants to go to him.”

Lance shakes his head. He says, “Yeah, well, she recognized the other one, too, remember? She’s not a great judge of Shiro-ness 100% of the time.”

“What other one?” Shiro demands. None of this makes sense. He focuses on staying calm, but that’s becoming an increasingly difficult task. He fought to get to them for months, and they’re acting like they don’t trust him—like they don’t even know him. “What’s going on here?”

“We need to take him to the infirmary,” Pidge says, stepping up and touching Keith’s arm lightly. “We can figure everything out there. Keith, come on.”

After a moment, Keith jerks a nod, blinking. “Alright,” he says, “you heard her. We’re going to the infirmary.”

Shiro feels lost and adrift. But it doesn’t look like he’s going to get anything but a fight if he digs in and demands immediate answers. _Something_ obviously happened while he was gone. Something extremely bad. Something tied to him, in some way. So he nods, and forces another smile. “Right,” he says, “the infirmary. Sounds good.”

#

The trip to the infirmary is an awkward affair. Hunk and Lance lead the way, glancing over their shoulders at Shiro every few steps. Keith and Pidge follow him, both holding their bayards now. Allura trails behind him. Her expression is still frozen into something distant and horrified. The bad feeling in Shiro’s gut gets worse.

“Sit over there,” Pidge says, when they reach the infirmary, motioning at one of the medical beds.

“Not that one,” Allura says, from the far side of the room. Her voice cracks. She has a hand braced on the wall. She is still staring. He thinks that if he moved too quickly she’d scream. He wishes someone would tell him what happened. He feels ready to crawl out of his skin. The not knowing is horrific.

“Of course not,” Pidge says, with a wince. “Sorry, Allura.”

Shiro swallows around the anxiety in his throat. “Can someone _please_ —”

“Sit,” Keith snaps, and Shiro smothers a scowl and sits. His pulse is humming under his skin and his nerves dance. He wishes they would just give him a hint about what the problem was. His mind is coming up with a lot of explanations in the void, and none of them are pleasant.

“Keith,” he says, keeping is voice soft. Keith flinches, his eyes squeezing shut for a moment as his jaw clenches. What the hell _happened_ while he was gone? “Keith, please, tell me what’s happening. Is something—is something wrong with Allura?”

Keith swallows. He says, his voice rough, “Just sit. Coran will be here soon.”

#

Coran arrives, as promised. He does a double-take upon seeing Shiro and then turns on his heel, changing course for Allura. Lance catches his arm before he can reach her, and whispers something down to him. Coran’s expression tightens and he nods, moving with Pidge over to the infirmary’s computers. “We’re going to need to do some scans,” Coran announces, and Shiro grits his teeth and nods.

Maybe if he just deals with this, they will tell him what the hell is going on. He has come so far. He can put up with some scans to help soothe whatever has them so worried. It must be serious. They wouldn’t treat him this way for no reason. He has to believe that.

They run their tests. They keep watching him. None of them put their bayards away. Allura does not move. Not at all. He can’t even tell if she’s breathing.

Finally, the computer beeps. Coran and Pidge stare at it, and then Pidge says, “Oh.” She sags, and Hunk steadies her. “Oh, it’s him. Him-him.”

“Original recipe Shiro?” Lance asks, cutting looks between the screen, Shiro, and Allura.

“Please don’t call him that,” Hunk says.

“Whatever. How do you feel about Shiro Prime?” Lance shoots back, and he recognizes their tone, the nervous chatter they indulge in to keep their minds off of situations they don’t feel equipped to handle. He missed it. It’s such a relief to hear it now, even though he doesn’t understand what they’re talking about.

Shiro clears his throat. “Please, guys, can someone talk to me? Now that we’ve established I’m me?” He tries for levity, but there’s no room for it in the air.

“What about the arm?” Keith asks, his voice strained. He looks like a wire pulled so tightly it’s about to snap, or a spring put under too much pressure.

“I’m not seeing any active programs,” Pidge says, her fingers flying across the keys. “A lot of the pathways are burnt out, actually.” She looks over at him, frowning, a question in her gaze. “I’m not sure how it’s still functioning.”

There’s frustration, in having to answer their questions when they won’t answer his. But it looks like the only way they’re going to get anywhere. “It doesn’t, really,” he says. “When Black—after that last fight with Zarkon, when I got… transported, or whatever. It shorted out, I guess. It moves, mostly. But that’s about it. Our tech guy couldn’t figure it out.” He shrugs. He’s gotten used to the mostly-useless weight of it.

In a way, it had been a relief to not deal with all the other things it could do.

Pidge stares at him. “Tech guy?”

And finally, _finally_ , they are talking. Shiro nods, and his smile comes easily, because he knows this news will be well-received, now that they’re finally willing to listen to him. He has been looking forward to telling her for so long. “Yeah, Katie. You know him. I tried to tell you earlier. I found Matt.”

Pidge’s expression cracks open. She whispers, “Matt? Matt’s alive?”

“Yeah. He’s waiting for you. I can take us—”

And she launches at him, hitting him in the chest, her arms tight around him. The queasy feeling in Shiro’s gut fades, at least a little. He holds her back, laughing a little with punched out relief. He doesn’t understand any of what just happened, but that’s alright. Things are on track now. Things will be fine.

He glances around the room, looking at the hesitation on the others’ faces, the complete shut-down on Keith’s, and—

And Allura is gone. Her space by the wall is just empty. He did not even see her leave.

Well. Maybe things aren’t quite as fine as he thought.

#

Allura’s legs carry her through the halls. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She isn’t thinking, not really. Her mind is buzzing with white-noise that she can’t even begin to process. She only knows that she couldn’t stand in the same room as _him_ anymore. Not without bursting into mad laughter or tears or screams.

She does not know where to go. She _would_ have gone to Shiro’s room. But… but what if _he_ goes there. She doesn’t want to see him. She doesn’t want to be with _him_ in Shiro’s room, where they—

She just doesn’t want that.

Her room promises nothing but empty spaces and an overturned bed. It is nothing but a reminder of the first night Shiro died, when she thought she would fly apart into atoms.

_He_ might turn up anywhere else. She saw the data. He is no clone. They will not keep him in the infirmary. They will have no reason to restrict his movement.

She walks, aimless, dragging her fingers along the wall.

She ends up in the hanger, blinking at the Lions in distant surprise. It is only as she steps into the humongous room that she recognizes the call in the back of her head, the pull that drew her here. She looks at Black, but it is not Black that wanted her here.

In fact, she cannot feel her connection to Black at all. It must have washed away, severed neatly, some time in the day. She has been too numb to feel it. That is two partings, now. Neither the Blue nor the Black Lion wanted her. Not when offered another choice.

Allura squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, tight against their unwelcome burn, and then turns away. She allows the pull in the back of her skull to lead her steps. It is better than anything she has to offer, presently. She walks past the Lions she knows, to the back of the hangar, where the gigantic White Lion hunches over. He is humongous. And unfinished. She can see missing panels, now, out of the heat of battle. One of his eyes is dim. One of his paws is little more than open circuitry.

His working eye is bright and warm. He lowers his head to the floor and opens his mouth.

He feels like home.

Allura stumbles in, crawling into the cockpit.

It is sparse—rough-hewn. Half of the controls look like they were thrown together by people who did not know what they were doing. Allura trails her fingers across them, the call in the back of her skull leading her towards the pilot’s chair.

She sinks down into it, and something eases, inside of her head. She lets out a shuddery breath, closing her eyes and pulling her legs up onto the chair.

“Oh,” she says. “Hello to you, too.”

#

Shiro expects the reunion he was waiting for to play out, once they are satisfied that his Galra arm is, apparently, not an immediate threat.

It does not happen that way.

Instead, Pidge and Coran disappear up to the bridge with the coordinates he gave them for Matt’s group. They do not, it seems, trust him all that much, and they want to verify that there isn’t some massive Galra outpost at the coordinates. It stings. He remembers when they used to trust him, once upon a time. He doesn’t understand what happened to change all of that.

He clears his throat, and says, “Now that we’ve got this,” he gestures around the room, “all cleared up, can someone tell me what’s going on?”

“I just remembered,” Lance blurts, scrambling towards the door, “that I need to help Pidge.”

“Yeah,” Hunk agrees, hustling after him, “me too, man.”

They both disappear without a backwards glance. Shiro stares at the door, burying another swell of frustration. He turns his gaze slowly back to Keith, the last one to remain, standing across the room with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He asks, his voice sharper than he means it to be, “Don’t you have somewhere to be, too?”

Keith grimaces. He looks tired, and there’s a hardness to his features that Shiro does not remember. If he had any baby-fat, he’s lost it. His cheekbones and jawline are both sharper. “No—that’s—no. What do you want to know?”

Shiro laughs, dry and sharp. “I want to know what happened. Why is everyone…?” He waves a hand. He doesn’t know how to describe what they are. Standoffish. _Afraid_.

Keith stares at the ground for a long, long moment. And then he nods, as though decided something. He says, “Lotor… cloned you. Sometime after you disappeared. And he sent the clone to us.”

Shiro wants to laugh again, but nothing in Keith’s demeanor indicates that he’s joking. Shiro stares at him, the words echoing in his head. He wants to reject even the thought, but it sounds just horrible enough to be true. The Galra have taken so much from him.

Maybe it makes sense that they’d take his body, too.

“I was cloned,” he says, finally, flat, when Keith does not go on.

Keith nods. “Yeah. He was… a sleeper agent, I guess. They programmed him to spy on us. Report back. I don’t know.”

Shiro absorbs that like a punch. The Galra stole his body and used it to hurt the others. And now everyone is real unhappy to see him. Shiro can put two and two together. His thoughts jerk, suddenly, to the way Allura stares at him, like she’s been flayed alive. The way she had to hold herself up with the wall. The way the others moved between them, forming a barrier. The facts all click together, offering him a terrible prospect to consider. He whispers, suddenly horrified, “It hurt Allura?”

It is all too clear to him, suddenly. Allura is the strongest of them. They can’t fly the Castle without her. This Lotor person would want to target her, surely. He does not want to think about what the monster might have done to her, to provoke such a response from everyone, but his mind supplies images, nonetheless.

Shiro’s stomach turns over. He thinks he will be ill. If it was a clone of him, did it share his memories? Did it use them to get close to her? To earn her trust? Did it—pervert desires already present? It must have—

Keith’s voice shakes Shiro from the spiraling horror of his thoughts. “No, no, Shiro, whatever you’re thinking—it didn’t happen. Okay? I promise. He wouldn’t have ever hurt Allura.” Keith says it like this is something obvious, something Shiro should have just known.

Brief relief runs like ice-water down Shiro’s spine. He swallows, hard, his mind latching onto the next piece of information in the rapid onrush of conversation. He rasps, trying to steady himself, “’Wouldn’t have?’”

Keith looks to the side, a muscle in his jaw jumping. He jerks out a nod. “Yeah. He’s dead. He died. Saving us. A little while ago.”

Shiro stares at him, trying to readjust his entire world view, one more time. It must be the sixth time that day. “I think,” he says, picking the words slowly, “that you need to start at the beginning.”

Keith nods. He’s still glaring at the floor, like it offended him on a deep and personal level. “Right,” he says, “Okay. So. The clone. He really thought he was you.”

“Right,” Shiro says. It is a strange thing to accept, but his life has been nothing but strange for years now. He was cloned. The clone had his memories. He can handle that.

Keith picks at his gloves. He looks deeply, truly uncomfortable when he says, “And he and Allura fell in love.”

Shiro stares, waiting for Keith to tell him this is all a joke in very poor taste. That doesn’t happen. He is left trying to process that the Galra cloned him. And that clone—sent to destroy his friends—fell in love with _his_ Princess, and—and he supposes that means the Galra did a pretty good job. He doesn’t say any of that. What he says is, “What.” His voice sounds flat and unfamiliar. Bitterness fills his mouth.

“I—yeah. They—look. It’s not—it’s not my story to tell, alright? But—he loved her. He overcame whatever the Galra did to him to save her from Lotor.”

Shiro still isn’t sure who the hell Lotor _is_. It’s hard to concentrate on that, right at the moment. He says, “And Allura. She—” He cannot finish the question. He doesn’t even really know how to start it. He’d thought—he’d promised himself that, when he got back, if he got back, he was going to be honest with her, about the way he felt.

But—

“She loved him,” Keith says, quietly.

Shiro can’t process it. He just _can’t_. There’s been too much, already. He looks to the side, his hands clenched into fists against his will. He asks, raw, “How did he die?”

Keith is quiet for a long, long moment. When he speaks his voice cracks. “Radiation poisoning. He saved two star systems. And then he died here. Allura—Allura was with him. In the end. She’s. She’s taking it really hard.”

For a long moment, they just sit in the room, in a silence that settles around them, intent on suffocation. Finally, Shiro forces a smile, and asks, with bitter levity, “So, is there anything _else_ I should know?”

Keith looks up to stare at him. His eyes are wide and guilty, and he looks away abruptly. He says, “No,” and Shiro can hear the lie in his voice, but it seems better not to push it. If there’s something Keith thinks should be kept back, after everything that was just thrown at Shiro, well…

There’s probably a good reason for it, and Shiro is too shaken to fight for the information.

“Great.” Nothing is great. Shiro runs a hand back through his hair and sighs. “What now?”

#

Keith walks Shiro to his room, as though he has forgotten the way. “I don’t…” Keith starts, hesitating outside of the door and casting Shiro a sideways look. “He stayed in here,” Keith says, finally. “I mean, at first we thought he was you, so of course he did, and then he’d saved Allura and lost his arm, and we just….” He shrugs, helplessly.

“Oh,” Shiro says. He doesn’t know what else to say. They gave up his room, to someone who wore his face. Not just when they didn’t know, but _afterwards_. They left some clone keep it. Even if he did save Allura, couldn’t they have given him his own space? Anger simmers in Shiro’s gut, but he doesn’t—he looked forward to this day for so long. It was all that kept him going, some days.

He does not want his memory of it to include screaming at Keith.

So he swallows the bitterness in the back of his throat and opens the door, believing he has braced himself for what he will find.

He has not. The room is… not as he remembered. The bed is messy. It doesn’t look as though it’s been made in weeks. There are new blankets on it, a new pillow. He wonders, numbly, if they all belong to Allura. One of the Castle’s mice is in the room, and it shrieks at the sight of him, scrambling backwards and out of sight. Shiro sighs, taking a cautious step into the room. He says, “He couldn’t have been too much like me, to keep the room like this.”

Keith does not come in, hovering nervously by the doorway instead. He says, “Allura’s been staying in here. Since…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to. Since the clone died. The clone she apparently loved.

Shiro stares at the messy bed and tries to deal with the knowledge that Allura slept in it, that she slept in it with a damn _copy_ of him, that—

He cuts that train of thought off, brutally. He can see it leads to nowhere but madness. “I think I want to go to the bridge,” Shiro says, backtracking out of the room as quickly as he can. “To see how Coran and Pidge are doing.”

“Right,” Keith says, still not quite looking at him. “Of course.”

#

The bridge, at least, feels the same. It still strikes Shiro as impressive and alien, especially after where he’s been living for the last few months. But it’s not better than anywhere else on the ship, really, no more normal. Pidge looks at him like she doesn’t know him and makes excuses to leave within moments, Keith trailing in her wake.

And then it is just Shiro and Coran. Shiro wonders how long it will take Coran to run off. He thinks he’d actually appreciate the quiet. He has a lot to… sort out. He doesn’t even know where to start. He stares at Allura’s station and then jerks his gaze away. His old station feels unfamiliar. Everything is wrong.

Coran steps up beside him, quietly, and says, “Not the homecoming you were expecting, is it?”

Shiro grimaces. “Not really, no.”

Coran hums, staring forward at the stars. He reaches out and squeezes Shiro’s shoulder, and it is good to know that someone, anyone, on this ship is some measure of happy to see him. “It’s good to have you back,” Coran says. “Give them a few ticks to process what happened. We’ve all been grieving.”

Shiro shakes his head. His throat aches. He says, regretting the words almost immediately, “Yeah. Just not for me.”

And he walks out of the bridge, before Coran can see his face.

#

Lingering on the bridge felt pointless, but Shiro doesn’t know where else to go. He spent months wanting nothing more than to be back here, and now that he is…. There is nowhere for him. All the empty spaces he thought belonged to him were filled up by someone with his face, and emptied again, and now they don’t fit him properly.

He avoids the common room, where he can hear the others talking in low, earnest voices. The halls are quiet and familiar, and he wants, so badly, to be happy to be back. But all of that has been spoiled. Ruined.

He grimaces, his stomach turning uncomfortably in his gut.

He is not surprised, really, when his feet take him to the hanger. The Lions wait there, resting. None of them seem concerned about him, or ready to bolt. He pauses by each of them, reassuring himself that he remembered what they looked like. He stops for longer in front of Black.

Allura climbed out of her, earlier. Not Keith. It stings, a little, on top of everything else, that Keith did not even end up leading the team. But in the grand scheme of things it hardly matters. It doesn’t compare to clones. Anyway, Allura fought amazingly well against the Galra. He never doubted her capability, it was just…

He never managed to stop seeing her being captured by the Galra, when he thought of her in combat. The thought chilled him, horrified him. He’d wanted to prevent it from occurring again, if that was at all possible.

Still. He is relieved _she_ was piloting Black. Better her than the copy of him. At least there is something on the Castle that went untouched by this clone. He wants to board her, but, if she is Allura’s now…

He sighs, glancing towards the White Lion. None of the others have asked about it yet, perhaps too shaken by everything else. Soon, though, he will have to explain what little he knows about it. He pinches the bridge of his nose. He could climb into the White Lion. There’s space enough in the half-finished cockpit to sleep. He knows that well enough after their mad dash across the universe, when the Lion decided, all on its own, that it wanted to go on a trip.

He frowns, then. The White Lion’s head no longer rests on the floor. Its working eye is lit and its mouth is closed. Shiro walks over and frowns up at it, tapping its paw. “Hey,” he calls. “What are you doing?” 

It does not answer him. In fact, he receives a cold rebuff over the small bond they managed to forge. It stings, after everything else that has happened. _He_ turned the damn thing on. He woke it up. He helped it get here, and—

And the Black Lion touches him, then, reaching cautiously towards his mind. He can feel her hope and yearning through the connection they share, and it washes over him like a wave. He turns towards her without thought, drawn by the need he can feel from her.

She purrs at him, welcoming and warm as he climbs into the cockpit. 

He slides into the pilot’s chair, smiling for the first time since he arrived on the Castle, and tells her, “I missed you, too.”


	2. Chapter 2

Allura wakes feeling like her head is stuffed with fabric and fog. Her neck hurts, and for one glorious moment the physical discomfort is all she is aware of. She did not dream, and she blinks at the darkened space around her, full of circuitry and dim panels, and for a moment does not remember.

It does not last. Memory arrives as a knife in her chest, twisting between her ribs. She twists in the pilot’s chair, getting her feet flat on the floor and bending over, for a moment sure she will be ill. It passes, aided by the sudden warmth of the White Lion’s attention in the back of her mind. He is… concerned for her. Confused. Hurt.

Allura marshals herself, grateful for the new focus. The Lion needs assistance. Not only that, but they need to find out where he came from and how he came to be… She would like to assume her father built the Lion, but he never mentioned such a project. He never mentioned so many things… She runs her hands over the unfinished controls, looking for answers and getting regret and confusion back.

The White Lion can’t give her the information she’s looking for. He doesn’t have it. He remembers waking, some months ago, but the world was blurry then. Small creatures, like her, but not as bright in the Lion’s perception, crawled around him. They helped push the blurriness back. _He_ moved among them—he woke the Lion up, she sees, and for a moment, in the Lion’s confusing memories, she is _him_ and _he_ is her, sitting in the pilot’s chair, their hands gripping the same controls, their minds connecting to the Lion—

Allura jerks out of the chair, shaking all over, suddenly. She feels stung, electrified.

The White Lion pushes regret at her, not sure what he did, but sorry that it resulted in her upset. “It’s alright,” she says, her voice only trembling slightly. “It wasn’t your fault.” It was just easy to sink into the Lion’s interface. Far easier than she found the process to be with Blue, or even Black. Her mind clicked with White, and she pats one of the controls, trying to comfort.

“You’re in bad shape,” she tells the Lion, and he agrees. “We’ll get you taken care of,” she promises. “And figure out where you came from.” 

It is a large project to work on. It will give her plenty to occupy her mind. She could not ask for anything better than that.

Unfortunately, it also means she will need to go speak with _him_ , at least briefly. But she can do that. It is not like she has a choice. He is unlikely to dissolve into stardust. He will remain. She will just have to… deal with it. She can do that, if she has to.

He is not her Shiro. She just needs to remember that. That’s all.

#

Shiro’s dreams are unpleasant, twisting things, where he walks through the Castle like a ghost, yelling to people who look through him like he isn’t there. He sleeps little, sitting in Black’s chair, instead, working. His eyes sting.

He toils, throughout the long hours of the night, with looking through Black’s records of the time he was away. He should. Catching up is necessary. For one thing, he needs to find out who Lotor _is_. He needs to know what the others faced, so he’s ready to assist them with it.

He regrets peering into the past almost immediately.

Black provides him with records of all the missions they flew to find him, when he first disappeared. He finds that Keith, in fact, did pilot Black. He just hated it, the experience all tangled up with his feelings of failure for Shiro’s disappearance in the first place. It soured whatever bond he might have otherwise formed with Black, who absorbed some of that guilt and fed it back, creating a loop that did neither of them any favors.

He finds information on Lotor. They know little enough about him, besides that he attacks sideways, where Zarkon would spear at them head-on. Where he has been before now remains a mystery, covered inadequately by the fact that he was exiled. The how and why of that are unknown. They have not fared well against him, in any case.

Black reveals the mission where they found the clone, floating in a dead ship in the middle of empty space. She displays the clone’s vital signs, weak and failing, moments away from suffocation as the air ran out on him. Shiro stares at the screen and then pushes it to the side.

He does the same for all of the other files dealing with the clone. He gets enough information about Lotor, about the broad strokes of what the others have done, from the rest of Black’s records. He doesn’t want to see what she has to say about the clone. 

He pushes away from the screen, eventually, rubbing at his stinging eyes. Less than a day ago, he wanted nothing more than to walk out into the hangar and the ship, to find the others, touch them, talk to them. Now, the prospect settles like a radioactive stone in his gut.

But it has to be done. He needs to find out if Coran and Pidge are satisfied that he is not leading them into an ambush. They need to come up with a plan to deal with Lotor. Those are clear-cut things he can accomplish. They can’t be handled if he’s hiding from the memory of a ghost. 

He will just have to deal with what happened. A clone showed up. The others accepted it, for some reason. Fine. He can’t change any of that, though it stings. He can still be professional. There’s work to be done. He stands, stretching out his arms and shoulders to delay the inevitable, and then, taking a bracing breath, he exits Black.

He finds Allura walking out of White.

She freezes at the sight of him, her expression stricken before she visibly marshals herself, replacing the twist of her mouth with something blank. Only her eyes give her away. They shine.

Shiro’s chest aches. He dared to imagine, on the cold, long days while he was away, that she would be happy to see him. He used to toy with how it would play out, to picture a wide smile breaking across her face, to imagine the way she’d gasp his name. When he felt especially daring, he liked to think she would run to him, throw her arms around his neck so he could bury his face in her hair, curl his arms around her, hold her tight and let the relief spill out between them….

She stares at him like he is a dead man, like it breaks her heart.

He looks away, his heart heavy and his mouth sour. He focuses on the moment. On the Lions. At least he knows, now, why his fledgling bond with White withered away. They were never meant for one another, but he knew that already. Black sits in his soul; he does not begrudge White choosing another. 

He says, gesturing at the White Lion, striving to keep his voice even and normal, “You have your work cut out for you. He handles like the Castle.”

Allura shifts. For a moment, he thinks she will flee back into White, but she remains. It might have been easier for them both if she had run. She says, “I see.” Her voice is _nearly_ professional. “Where did you find him? He is confused about it.”

Shiro nods. “It’s a long story,” he warns.

Allura takes a shaky breath. Her arms are crossed over her chest, her fingers digging into her arms. She looks like she’s trying to hold her body together. Bile burns at the back of Shiro’s throat. He can’t help but wondering, coldly, if she responded like this when he disappeared.

But why would she have? She was in love with the clone. All he had with her was potential.

She says, cutting into his dark thoughts, “Alright. Then we should find the others. They should hear it, too.”

#

They find the others on the bridge. Shiro leads the way in. Allura didn’t seem comfortable with him walking behind her, and he… didn’t want to push it. The others blink at them, wide-eyed and clearly surprised by their joint entrance. Shiro can’t read the glances they exchange before he clears his throat and nods a greeting.

Allura doesn’t speak. She moves past him to her station, where she stands, separated from the rest of them. 

“You’re just in time,” Pidge says, into the awkward silence. “Coran and I have been over the coordinates enough times to feel comfortable with them. We’d… we’d like to go. If that’s… if we could.” She looks like she expects someone to tell her no. How many people have, during her search for her family?

Allura nods, though. She says, her voice clear and crisp, “I will prepare us.”

Shiro swallows. He should feel relieved. This is what he wanted, for so long. But it’s all happening the wrong way. He says, “Great. But, before we go… Look. Pidge. Matt isn’t… he isn’t quite the way you remember him.” No one could go through what he did and come out the other side the same.

Pidge blinks at him and then snorts a laugh. “I’m hardly the little sister he remembers, either.”

“True. I just wanted—I just thought you should know. He’s part of a group now. They call themselves the Fist. They’re fighting against Zarkon.”

Keith glances up from where he’d been glaring at the floor to ask, “Like the Blade?”

Shiro shrugs. “Not exactly.” Matt’s group was nowhere near as organized as the Blade. They weren’t as well funded. Nor as patient. Nor, perhaps, as principled….

“Right…” Lance frowns, his arms crossed. He’s standing by Allura, and his posture is far from welcoming. “Well, that doesn’t sound portentous or anything. Anything else you want to tell us about them? Were they the ones with the White Lion?”

Shiro knew they’d get here, eventually, if he stuck with the conversation. He nods. “Yes, actually. They found it years ago. They didn’t know what it was, but, well… They hoped it was a weapon, I guess. They tried to repair it, but they couldn’t make it work, so.” He shrugs.

“Until you got there,” Hunk says, frowning over at him, more out of consideration than anger, Shiro thinks. “You got it to work?”

“Mm. It took a while, but yes. And since then we’ve been using it to hit Galra outposts and ships. We couldn’t locate you, and it seemed like the best use of our time….”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Hunks says, waving his hands. “You totally found us, though, so…?”

“The Lion found you,” Shiro corrects. He imagined this conversation for so long. There wasn’t much else to do in White, when he took off. It’s a relief to finally have it play out. It feels almost normal. “A few weeks ago, it just freaked out and took off. If I hadn’t been onboard I think it would have left without me. It took serious effort to get it to stop, every now and then, so I could get food and water.”

The last few weeks hadn’t been pleasant. It had only been the constant thrum of duty and desperation bleeding over from the White Lion that kept Shiro going. Well, that and the fact that he couldn’t very well leave it. It could have fallen into Galra hands. That would have been… deeply unfortunate.

Lance shoots Pidge a nervous, questioning look, and she nods back, passing secrets that Shiro cannot decode. She asks, “How long ago, exactly?”

Shiro glances between them, unsure why it matters. He feels constantly off his balance with them, now, out of step with the rest of the group. “I don’t… I’m not sure, probably—”

“It’s not important,” Allura interrupts, her eyes forward, on her screens. “What else do you know about the Lion?”

Shiro stares at her for a long moment. She looks… brittle. Tired. He wants to go over, take her hand again. He does not think it would be welcomed. Lance clears his throat, pointedly, and Shiro says, “Not much, sorry. There are files in its memory, but they’re encoded beyond anything we could figure out. Pidge and Hunk will hopefully have more luck with them.”

Allura nods, stiff. She says, “Very well. This group, they aren’t going to fire on us when we arrive, correct?”

“They better not,” Shiro says, and then grimaces. “Even if they did… they’re no match for the Castle. You’ll see.”

Allura sighs. “I suppose we will. Alright, everyone. Hold on.”

#

The wormhole crosses in seconds the distance it took Shiro weeks to cover.

Allura passes them through, and they end up in a system with a single star and no habitable planets. The scanners pick up one moon that _might_ be livable, though it would be unpleasant. No attacks rattle against the Castle’s shields. No alarms go off. Pidge stands at her station, gripping the console and chewing on her bottom lip.

“I need to contact them,” Shiro says, his voice nails dragged down Allura’s face. She grits her teeth together until they ache. “Holt, this is Shiro. I’ve brought someone to see you.”

There is a moment of silence; Pidge vibrates so that her nerves are palpable in the room around them. And then the comm system buzzes with static that clears just enough for them to hear, “Shiro? You’re _alive_?”

Pidge cries out, holding onto the console for balance when she yells, “Matt! Matt, it’s me!”

“Katie?” The man—Matt Holt, it must be—sounds thunderstruck. Something clatters, wherever he is. Someone in the background curses. “Katie—is that you? Really you? Hold on, hold on, I’m coming up there, I’m—”

Pidge has already run out of the room. Shiro says, “I think she’s coming to you, man. We’ll be moonside in a tick. Anyone else coming?”

Allura busies her hands with scans that don’t need to be completed, hoping they will just go. She’d appreciate the quiet. It is not surprising when the Paladins all hurry away, caught up in their friend’s joy, in the excitement of meeting new people.

She wonders if it is really surprising that _he_ hesitates. “Princess?” he asks, the formality sitting oddly between them. It sounds strange in his voice.

“I will stay here,” she says, her voice as blank as she can make it. “There are duties that require my attention. We received a transmission from the Blade a moment ago.”

He lingers a moment longer. She can feel him watching her, staring at the side of her face. “Alright,” he says, finally. “I’ll…. If you need anything, you can…”

“Thank you,” she says, stiff. And once he leaves she bows her head over, her fingers curling up to her palms, her throat so thick she cannot breathe for a long moment.

Coran says, quietly, “Princess…”

“I’m fine,” she lies. “Come look at this. The Blade has picked up some strange chatter about Zarkon.” It is as good an opportunity for distraction as any.

#

The moon base was only home for a few months—from the time Shiro woke up until the time the White Lion decided to take off. In that time, Shiro never developed much of a fondness for it. It was ever cold and damp, with a faint scent of rotten eggs that haunted everything. 

The structures of the base were old and dilapidated, but obviously Altean in origin. They reminded him of the Castle, if it had been built purely for function. The rooms and corridors were smaller, the arches were less ornate, the colors grayed either by age or design. 

As near as Shiro could tell, it had been built to house a small team, no more than a dozen people. It now held nearly three times that number. People bunked up in the small rooms and learned to move around one another through the crowded halls. It would have made sense if the number of people warmed the rooms, but, somehow, that never happened.

At least the rotten egg smell covered the scent of unwashed bodies. There wasn’t much in the way of amenities, on the base. Or fresh food. Or potable water.

Matt’s group made do with supplies stolen from the Galra, and the stores they found buried under the complex. The food was probably ten-thousand years old, but it was still edible. They’d fed it to Shiro, anyway, and he hadn’t died, so… It must have been fine.

Pidge had already landed by the time the rest of them reached the surface. Shiro sat Black down by Green, sliding out into the cold air. The wind cut right through his armor, and he grimaced, turning his shoulder to it and squinting through the gray snow.

He found Pidge a few feet away from Green, on the ground. She was laughing, or crying, it was hard to tell. She’d bowled Matt over completely, and he lay sprawled out, his arms around her, ragged fabric catching the snow, the wrap over his face flapping loose in the wind. He was yelling something incomprehensible to Shiro, his expression transformed by sheer joy.

Shiro stared down at them, something bitter clawing at his throat.

“Should we…?” Hunk asks, coming to stand near Shiro, and gesturing at the Holt siblings.

“Leave them for now,” Shiro advised. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

#

The base had been built around the White Lion. His hangar is empty now, and the group had spread into the free-space, Shiro sees, as they walk down the entry tunnel. Blankets and ramshackle beds lined the huge space. Stores were stacked near the center of the hangar, and other stations waited here and there, all newly arranged.

“This is where you ended up?” Keith asks, looking around the space, frowning as they were noticed. 

“Hey,” Huirice—a half-Galra taller than anyone else Shiro had ever met—calls, looking up from her work and beaming. “Hey! Shiro came back!” She crosses the room in a few long strides, ignoring the others to grab him in a crushing hug, pulling back enough to beam at him with a lop-sided smile. “Didn’t think we’d see you again, Paladin boy. And you brought friends!”

“I did,” Shiro agrees, swept up in her enthusiasm. “Huirice, I’d like you to meet Voltron’s other Paladins. Guys, this is Huirice. She found me.”

“It wasn’t difficult,” Huirice says, shrugging. “He was just lying in front of the bloody Lion. Hard to miss.”

“So, wait,” Hunk says, looking around the room with a frown. “You were here with the White Lion? You know about it?”

Huirice scoffs, throwing one long arm over Hunk’s shoulder and gesturing expansively at the space the White Lion used to fill. “Know about it? Small one, I got it running.”

Hunk raises his eyebrows. “Yeah? Did you, what, just find it, or?”

“Mhm,” Huirice says, grinning. She was always a sucker for a willing audience. “It was just a pile of junk when I got here, let me tell you. But we managed to patch it up. Not that it mattered much, until Paladin boy showed up and sweet-talked it until waking up. We did a lot of good with it, then. At least, until he stole it. Speaking of, Shiro. You want to explain that?”

“I didn’t steal him,” Shiro says, shrugging. “He took off. I was only along for the ride.”

“Right,” Huirice says, opening her mouth to continue on. Whatever else she was going to say is cut off when Matt and Pidge stumble down the hall at their back. They are both making a ruckus, and Pidge is riding on Matt’s shoulders, her expression drunk with joy and her cheeks red with embarrassment or the cold.

“Listen here, you sarkers!” Matt hollers, loud in a way Shiro is still getting used to. He looks happier than Shiro can ever remember seeing him, certainly happier than he’d looked when Shiro had finally woken up and blinked up at him. “This is my sister! She’s a sarking Paladin of Voltron! She flies one of the Lions! She beat the shit out of Zarkon!”

The crowd taking notice around the room cheers, loud and raucous. They’re moving forward en masse, clustering around the new arrivals, radiating pleasure and excitement. Shiro loses sight of Matt and Pidge momentarily in the crowd, but he hears it when Matt yells, “So let’s give her a Fist welcome, yeah?”

That gets the biggest cheer of them all.

#

Shiro is familiar with Fist welcomes.

He got one, too, when he woke up.

It is, pretty much, as he remembers. There is a sudden abundance of the terrible alcohol that they distill through some method he doesn’t like to think about too hard. Usually, everyone hoards their booze, but it flows freely during these rare celebrations, shared in banged up tins and, occasionally, large bowls.

Lance eyes a proffered glass with suspicion, very nearly making a smart decision, before the pretty girl offering it to him winks. He downs it, then, and Shiro shakes his head, listening to him wheeze and cough as it fights all the way down.

Then again, Shiro has no room to judge. He learned his lesson about the booze—it was bad enough it almost made him wish he was still unconscious, the first time he drank it—but he finds a glass pressed into his hands and he drinks it without thought. It would be nice to feel blurry, just for a while.

He finds a quiet spot near someone’s cot and settles with his cup, nursing it faster than he should and looking out over the crowd. Someone is attempting to play music, and doing a pretty good job of it. The other Paladins are little individual islands of attention around the room, shiny and new, something interesting to take the Fists’ minds off the grimness of their day to day life.

Only Keith manages to avoid being swamped in, his crossed arms and down-turned jaw a warning that most of the Fists take to heart. He is staring, surreptitiously, at Shiro, and Shiro thinks he should probably go over there and find out what’s going on, but. But there is a part of him that worries it’ll result in another upset to his entire world view, and he isn’t sure he’s drank enough to deal with that.

He slugs back the last of the alcohol in his cup—it burns like acid; when Shiro asked Matt what was in it, he only got a smirk as an answer. His face is starting to feel numb.

“Shiro!” Matt crows, crashing into his side and throwing a sloppy arm over his shoulders. “Shiro, Shiro, Shiro.” He is beaming like an idiot, his smile too wide and his eyes bright. “Shiro. You brought me Katie. You brought Katie me.”

“I did,” Shiro agrees, taking the glass that Matt is either offering him, or simply trying to spill on him. In either case, it is obvious Matt doesn’t need any more of it.

“You’re so great,” Matt says, patting him on the face when he tries to take a drink. Shiro wipes at the spilled liquid that results from the move as best he can, but there’s not much to be done. He shakes his hand off, and Matt frowns at him, eyes narrowing suddenly. “So why’re you so sad, man?”

“I’m just tired,” Shiro says. As lies go, it hardly counts. He _is_ tired. He doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t. 

“No,” Matt says, pushing back and squinting. “You’re…” He sucks in a breath and leans in to speak in what he probably thinks is a whisper. “Hey, where is she? Your girl? The _Princess_?”

Shiro really wishes that Matt hadn’t spilled his drink. He says, “Look, I think we should probably go find—”

“No, and you know, now that I think about it, I’m not sure why you’re even, like, down here on this stupid rock. I figured you’d be—” He makes a gesture that translates embarrassingly clearly, even in a room with people from a dozen different systems. Shiro grimaces and grabs his hands, forcing them down.

“Stop it.”

Matt glares at him. “You _said_ —” he starts, accusatory.

“Enough!” Shiro didn’t mean to yell. Matt flinches back from him, wearing a shadow of the expression he learned in the gladiatorial pits, like he never stopped being afraid of Shiro, not really, not after everything.

Shiro wishes he’d never told Matt anything about Allura. He wishes he’d never let Matt draw the information out of him, one secret at a time, as they worked on the White Lion. He wishes that Matt had never advised him, grim and serious, “You gotta tell her, man. You can’t keep this to yourself. I mean it.”

Shiro grinds his teeth, taking a step back, away from Matt and his shocked expression. Luckily, the crowd is too loud, too drunk, to care about his outburst. “Just leave it,” Shiro says, turning. He shoulders his way through the room, up the ramp, out into the dark. The cold air feels good on his hot face. 

He grimaces when, a moment later, he hears footsteps following him.

Hunk shuffles to a stop beside him, his breath frosting in the damp, cold air. “Hey,” Hunk says, cutting him a nervous look. “I saw you, uh. Leave. Is. Uh. Is everything okay?”

Shiro huffs out a laugh. He says, “Everything is great.”

“Right, yes,” Hunk says, stamping his feet a little. “That was a stupid question. This has to be super weird for you.”

Shiro doesn’t reply. He can’t think of anything to say that he wouldn’t regret later. The numb buzz of alcohol through his brain is already starting to fade.

“It’s really weird for me, too,” Hunk says, and Shiro turns to gape at him, because how can he even—

“I stood at your wake until my knees buckled.” Hunk sounds numb, dreamy. He stares forward, at the thick fog surrounding them. “I saw them put you in the coffin. I made you lemon drop cookies. I mean. It wasn’t really you, I get that. But we had—we had no body. For you. You were just gone. Poof. So, it kind of… It felt like closure. For both of you. Like we were giving _you_ that, too, and now you’re. You’re here, and it’s so strange, man, I can’t even….”

Hunk shakes his head, rubbing his hands over his face. Shiro wants to be angry at him, and he is, a slow, deep anger that feels like it might never go completely away. But he’s also tired. And heartsore. The open confusion and hurt on Hunk’s face twists in his gut. He sighs, staring out into the night.

Hunk says, thumping his shoulders back against the wall, “Man, our lives are really messed up.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says. “They really are.”

#

Allura focuses on the Blade’s message and all it portends, trying to use the work to keep out the rest of the world. It works, mostly. She barely thinks about the way the Paladins ran off, the group changing and settling, shifting her, once more, over to the side.

It is not worth thinking about. They are a team, the five of them. She was only ever a place-holder.

And there is work to be done, while they frolic around down on some moon.

Lotor is as slippery as ever, traceable by the Blade only through whispers. That is not surprising. What _is_ surprising, and disturbing, are a few more messages referring to Zarkon. They use the present tense.

“Princess,” Coran says, standing at her shoulder and staring at the information spread around them. “There’s… he was very dead. I don’t see how anyone could survive what Voltron did to him.”

Allura stares at the words _unhappy with Prince Lotor’s actions_ and feels something squirming in her guts. She says, “He lived for ten-thousand years. I don’t see how anyone could survive that, either.”

There was a part of her that never believed Zarkon to be dead. He had caused so much harm, destroyed so much… Monsters like that are not killed. Perhaps ever.

Coran shifts, uncomfortable. “If he is alive, where has he been?”

“Recovering, perhaps.”

“Should we let the others know?”

Allura frowns at the mention of them, shaking her head. “It can wait until they return. There is little to it, in any case.” She closes the screens, with their vague, unhelpful portents, and frowns. There is another message from the Blade, hidden amongst the others. She cocks her head, opening it with a frown. “What’s this…?”

Lotor’s face pops up on the view-screen, larger than life. Grinning. Allura cries out, jerking back a step. Her heart lurches, turns inside out. Coran grabs her arm, jerking her back, his fingers barely felt. She feels distant from her body, her startled surprise morphing into anger that burns so hot it freezes. She snarls, he took—he—

Lotor says, “Princess, I hope this message finds you well.”

Allura’s sense of hearing goes fuzzy, blurry. She can see Lotor’s mouth moving, but for a moment she hears none of it. A message. A recording. Her knees sag, suddenly, and Coran shifts his grip so carefully, so skillfully that she does not even dip. He has always been holding her family up. He reaches out, then, trying to turn off the recording, and she grabs his wrist, squeezing tight, before he can.

“Don’t,” she says, a rasp. “Let it play.” 

“—both reasonable people,” Lotor is saying, as her hearing snaps back with only a terrible, faint ringing to betray her weakness. “We can end this war, you and I. No more bloodshed. No more… unnecessary losses. I am not my father. I can see a way forward for the Galra that need not feature so much unpleasantness. But I cannot achieve it on my own. I require a partner who would show the rest of the universe how serious I am about moving forward. Together. I can only accomplish it with your aid. And… your hand.

“Consider my offer. There is no reason for us both to toil separately for the same goal. There is no reason for your friends to continue to risk their lives. We can keep them safe. I await your response with baited breath.” He smiles at her, as charming as a ghurnish. And then he leans back, gestures lazily, and the message ends.

The screen goes black.

Allura stares at it, breathing fast and shallow, her pulse jerky, broken. His voice repeats itself in her ears like poison. She can see his face on her eyelids. She wants to cut them off.

“Delete it,” she says, staring forward, fingers curled up tight to keep them from shaking. Her voice sounds strange. Alien.

Coran tightens his grip on her arm. He sounds far away. “Princess—”

“Delete it!” She jerks away from him, blinking in a futile attempt to clear her vision. “I will not have his voice in the Castle! I will not have his image here! I will—I will not! I—!”

“It’s gone!” Coran says, soothing, gentling. “Princess, it is gone.”

Allura nods. She is gripping a console, bent over it, panting. She does not remember the steps that brought her here. “Thank you,” she says, and her voice is a rasp. For a moment, they stand in the echoing silence of the bridge. It seems immense, suddenly. Empty.

“I think I’ll go check on the White Lion,” Allura says, when her throat is not so tight. She does not want to be on the bridge anymore. She does not really want to be anywhere, but especially not in this place. “Perhaps I can figure out where it came from, originally.” After all, no guerilla group built it, no matter how great their mechanical skills.

“Alright, Princess,” Coran says, and she hates the pity in his voice.

#

The trip to the hangar is a blur, unremembered after she completes it. She blinks when she bumps into the White Lion’s paw and glances up at it, her pulses echoing in her ears. The Lion nudges her thoughts, worry threading through their connection, and she says, “I’m fine,” and climbs into the cockpit.

The cockpit still looks as though it is held together more by hope than anything else. Allura sinks into the chair, leans over, and hangs her head between her knees. She breathes in air that smells of grease and, for some reason, sour eggs. She only looks up when one of the monitors beeps, soft and insistently.

“Hm?” She asks, scrubbing at her treacherous eyes. There’s a notification blinking on the screen, the static taking it in and out of focus. “Something for me?” she asks, not sure she feels up to whatever it is. But White pushes at her, concerned and focused, and she sniffs, and reaches for the alert.

Static, loud and jarring, fills the cockpit for a moment, and then it clears, just enough for her to make out a familiar voice. “—not finish the Lion without the material from the comet that I sent the—”

It is her father. Allura stares forward, her fingers curling around the arms of the chair, shock landing like a punch across her jaw. There is no video. Just King Alfor’s voice, echoing around her, degraded with age, cracked and broken and wonderful.

“—no more time to spend here, regretfully—always a long shot, but I hoped—my daughter, I want you to—”

The recording stops there, leaving behind nothing but static. Allura jerks a hand out, clumsy, and replays it, not really trying to pick out new words. She just wants to hear her father’s voice. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. She listens to it over and over again, and then presses her face into her hands, and shudders.

White nudges her, unsure, worried, and she shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I am happy you showed me.” She wipes at her face. “And now we know who built you.” The confirmation of what she’d dared to hope is a relief, especially after everything else that has happened the last few quintants.

She is surprised when White sends back unhappiness, along with images of his unfinished body, his missing eye, the exposed bones of his foot, comparing the images with the other Lions, whole and complete, perfect and shining. He is damaged. Flawed. Imperfect. Unworthy.

Allura’s heart aches and she shakes her head. She says, “No, no, you are—you are perfect, as you are. I am so pleased you’re here.” She feels ill-equipped to offer whatever he needs in her current state. The words tangle around her tongue, and she wishes she could show him the truth of it and—

And she feels White slide along her thoughts, the way she slides along his. She freezes, the sensation strange and foreign, but not invasive. Not exactly. She pants, “What—?”

White’s sudden relief cuts off the question. He pulls images, memories, to the forefront of her thoughts, a question echoing around them. He shows her Shiro— _her_ Shiro—after Lotor’s attack on the ship, laying in the infirmary, a mask over his newly scarred face, his arm abruptly shortened, Galra circuitry sparking at the place where it ended. She sees her own hand, resting on his shoulder, tender. Soft.

Allura bites back a cry, the memories stabbing down into the battered parts of her heart. They fade slowly, held by the White Lion’s question, his desire to understand if she values and accepts him in the same way, even though he is imperfection itself.

“Yes,” she says, quietly, when she can. “Yes, that’s—yes.”

White settles, then, letting go of the tension he carried since his arrival. He purrs, softly around her, the sound whirring out of rhythm occasionally. She leans back in the chair, listening to the sound, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think anymore.


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone in the Fist base is slow to stir on the morning after the celebration. Shiro watches them wake up from the fire he’s started, where he’s warming up a tin of food that looks vaguely edible. He’d normally wait for Hunk, who has the uncanny ability to make anything taste decent, but after watching Hunk throw up for the third time he’d decided it would be best if he just handled it.

Keith sits across the firepit and stares at him surreptitiously. Shiro needs to do something about whatever is going on with him, but his headache isn’t going to allow it currently. So he hands Keith a plate, and Keith nods a thanks, and they leave it there.

The others wander over as they wake, settling with grunts and pained moans. Shiro snorts at them, handing Pidge a cup of something not remotely like coffee when she sinks down, looking as though the entire world has betrayed her. She whimpers something that might be thanks, and he feels guilty about letting her drink the previous evening, but…

But he has let her do worse things. He’s led her into war.

What’s alcohol compared to blood?

Matt joins them shortly after Pidge, and they lean against one another, the similarities in their features even more obvious in the dim light. Matt is leaner than she is, but they have the same eyes, the same nose, the same mouth. Hunk wanders up a few moments later, with Lance rounding out the group, his new friend tagging along, two of her arms wrapped around him, one over his shoulders, one around his waist. He looks dazed, but happy.

Everyone drinks around the crackling flames for a moment, and then Pidge twists her cup around, and asks, quietly, “So… Dad?”

Matt grimaces and shakes his head, just once, curt.

Pidge swallows audibly and nods. “Right,” she says, her voice a tremble. “Right.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt whispers back, and she reaches over, covering his hand. Shiro looks away from the pair of them. He catches Keith staring at him, again, and sighs when Keith jerks his gaze away. Matt clears his throat, then, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand before he speaks, his tone forcefully light. “So, Shiro, man. I was thinking. Now that you’re back and you brought, you know, Voltron, we could… we could hit the big one.”

_That_ gets everyone’s attention. Hunk looks up, still faintly green, and asks, “The big what now?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Shiro says.

But Matt only rolls his eyes. “The big one. The fuel refinery that the Galra Empire uses to move around this part of the universe. It’s close by. We’ve wanted to hit it for ages, but it’s just too big, too well-guarded. We never could, before now.”

“I’m not sure that’s changed,” Shiro says, repeating the point for anyone willing to listen. Matt used to come up with all kinds of plans about taking the refinery out, but the truth was… it was gigantic, well-guarded, and constantly surrounded by Galra ships that needed the fuel. 

“Of course it has,” Matt says, taking a huge gulp of his drink. “You have Voltron! Defender of the universe! And a giant ship up in the atmosphere. Between that and our fighters, we can take it out.” 

Shiro opens his mouth to try some sanity again, and Pidge says, “Come on, Shiro, lets at least hear him out.”

He sighs, glancing around the fire. The others all look interested, as well. And he can’t really blame them. The idea of going to do _something_ sounds great. They just don’t know what they’re getting into. They haven’t seen the refinery. “Fine,” he says, standing and stretching. “We’ll go back to the Castle and talk it over.”

#

Matt looks around the hangar bay with his jaw hanging open, his eyes darting around to take it all in. He flew up to the Castle with Pidge, and his excited chatter about the Lion filtered over the radio the entire time. He doesn’t have anything to say once they land.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Pidge asks, staring up at him with a soft smile. 

“Pretty cool?” Matt asks, turning in a slow circle. “This is—this is insane. This is—”

Pidge pokes him in the side. “This is only the hangar. Come on.”

“Holy shit,” Matt murmurs, letting Pidge drag him along. He tugs at his clothes as they go, nervous little movements that only draw attention to the worn, mismatched fabrics. “Wait—wait, you’re taking me to meet a Princess? A Princess that lives _here_? I should, I’m not—”

“It’s just Allura,” Pidge says, waving a hand dismissively. “She’s great. Don’t be weird to her, I mean it.”

Matt looks calmer, at least outwardly, by the time they reach the bridge, where Allura and Coran are waiting for them, images of the refinery already pulled up and displayed. Allura’s eyes are rimmed in red and her smile sits crooked on her mouth when Pidge rushes over to introduce Matt. Shiro shakes his head and finds Coran to ask, “Everything go alright up here yesterday?”

Coran jumps. “What? Oh, yes, of course. Everything here was fine. Great. Perfect, even! Yes, indeed, so, this is the installation our new compatriots would like us to attack? It’s going to be tricky, I can tell you that right now!” Coran shoots a guilty look in Allura’s direction, and Shiro frowns, ready to push it, but—

But Matt nudges him then, giving Coran the time to flee. Shiro starts after him, and Matt hisses, “That’s your Princess?”

Shiro flinches. “She’s not—”

Matt rolls his eyes and gestures rudely, before his expression goes grim. He asks, quietly, “What happened to her?” He sounds legitimately worried. He’s always been a good kid.

The question stings with unexpected guilt. Shiro looks over at her, where she is talking quietly with Lance and Pidge, and he thinks, suddenly, about exactly what she went through. It leaves him shockingly cold, aching inside. He says, “It’s a long story.”

“Right,” Matt drawls, narrowing his eyes, and they are called to hash out a potential plan before he can question Shiro any further, a small blessing.

#

The refinery the Fist wants to attack is immense and surrounded by layer upon layer of security. The space around it is mined, and there is a web of stations set up to defend it, covered in weapons, all of them focused solely on protecting the refinery.

“We can take it,” Matt Holt says, determined, hungry for a fight, after detailing the intelligence his people have gathered about the refinery. It is so strange to see him beside Pidge. Allura has not seen anyone with a family member for so long. They look so similar. They are so comfortable with one another. She looks away from them, ignoring the slicing pain inside her ribs, the ugly jealousy creeping up the back of her throat.

“It would be a risk,” Allura says, unconvinced by his assertion that they can sneak in one of the lanes used by the ships transporting the completed fuel away from the station. “Even with Voltron and the Castle.”

“Our fighters will help,” Matt says. “I know we’re not as impressive as…” He gestures at the room, at the Paladins. “But we can hold our own.”

“These weapons will tear your ships apart. Your shields are… insufficient.”

“They have to hit us first.”

Allura stares at him, recognizing the same determination she so often sees in Pidge. A brother. Family. Allura blinks and shakes her head. “I will not bring you into a battle knowing you would likely not survive.” She would not do that to Pidge.

“But—”

“The princess is right,” _he_ says, standing almost directly across from her, frowning. “Those stations would cut your people to pieces.”

“So we’ll get better shields. I have some ideas on how to do it, and with Katie here, with your resources, it shouldn’t take too long. A few days. Come on. It’s worth it. We’ll cripple the Galra in this part of space if we pull this off.”

“He’s got a point,” Lance says, frowning at the refinery. Keith has remained silent for the entire meeting, but Allura feels that he probably agrees with Matt and now Lance. It would be in his nature. “If we could get their shields up to snuff… We could pull it off. They won’t even see it coming. They have no reason to think we’d be here. And we could reach out to the Blade. See if they want to help.”

Allura sighs. She has a bad feeling about this, but that is hardly a reason not to proceed forward. None of her feelings have been good, of late. She says, “I’m not sure…”

“Look, just let us work on the shields, alright? You can contact these Blade people. And then, if you don’t think everything is sufficiently safe, we’ll shelve it, okay?” Matt says, full of hope, and Allura gives in with a grimace. A few days will give her time to work with the White Lion. And, who knows, perhaps they will succeed.

#

The meeting adjourns with little fanfare. Pidge just grabs Matt and drags him from the room, Hunk and Lance drawn along in their wake as she promises to show him around the Castle. No doubt they will end up squirreled away somewhere, devising some plan or another. Whatever they come up with will either provide the shields the Fist needs, or end up blowing the ships up.

Shiro sighs, watching them go. The back of his neck itches, and he turns to find Keith quickly looking away, one more time. Coran is busy studying the refinery, and Allura is engrossed in sending a communique to the Blade. There is unlikely to be a better time for Shiro to handle whatever is going on with Keith.

He just doesn’t want to.

But Shiro is well used to doing things he wants to avoid. So he takes a bracing breath, squares back his shoulders, and walks over to Keith, whose eyes widen with alarm. For a moment, he thinks Keith will try to bolt past him, but that passes. “Hey,” Shiro says, awkward and aware of it, “can we talk?” He tilts his head towards the door, because if they have to have this conversation, he’d rather it not be in front of anyone else.

“Sure,” Keith says, with an expression that says he’d rather carve out his own tongue and then swallow it. They walk out of the control room, side by side. Shiro runs through conversational starters in his head, but they all sound stupid, ridiculous. 

“So,” he says, finally, giving up on finding anything decent to segue into it, “what’s up?”

Keith scoffs. “Really?”

Shiro regrets this conversation already. But it’s one more thing that needs handled, a mess left by a dead man that he has to clean up, another reason to resent the man who stole his face. He says, “Yeah, really. It’s—what’s going on?” It’s a weak start, even Shiro can recognize that. It’s just the best he has. He has no idea how else to approach the topic.

Keith snorts, his steps speeding up as he snaps, “What’s going on? What’s going on is that the Galra cloned you! And I let him fool me—I thought he was you and then, when it turned out he wasn’t, I was so mad at him. I hated him. I hated the others when they didn’t. I thought they were—it was—they were wrong, I thought, but then I felt him in my head, alright? In the Lions. And he was—he felt just like you.”

Shiro tries to process everything Keith throws at him, snagging on the mention of the Lions. He cannot feign surprise, not really. He would have liked to pretend that the clone never piloted a Lion, but he’d glanced at the missions around the clone’s death.

His easy replacement is a hurt he doesn’t have time to deal with at the moment.

Not with Keith continuing, “And I thought—I thought I made a mistake. A huge mistake. By hating him. I thought you’d be disappointed, if you knew what I did. How I treated him. And then he _died_.” Keith laughs, brokenly. He stops walking abruptly and yanks at his hair. “He died, and it was like losing you, all over again, and I thought, I thought I screwed up. Even worse than I knew. But I was going to do better. I thought I was doing better. I thought I was honoring your wishes. What your wishes would have been, if you knew what was going on.”

Keith drags in a breath, shaky. When he continues, into the stunned silence that Shiro does not know how to fill, his voice cracks. “And then you came back. The real you. And I. You’re not—you’re angry at us, I can tell, and I—”

He sags, then, all of the fight going out of him. “I don’t know where I messed up, anymore. I don’t know where I made mistakes. What I did wrong. Was I right at first? Were the rest of them—I just—I don’t know how to feel, or what I feel. He died, and it hurts, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to feel that way anymore, I feel like I shouldn’t, I don’t—”

“Keith.” Shiro touches his shoulder, not sure what else to offer, and Keith pivots into him, grabbing him in an embrace that feels like a drowning man’s desperate grapple, more likely to drag a rescuer down than to result in salvation.

“I thought you were dead,” Keith grinds out. “And he died. And I—I tried to do what I thought you’d want, I tried not to let you down, but I don’t know, now. I think I screwed up. I don’t know. I don’t.”

“You did great,” Shiro says, because taking care of Keith is, if nothing else, second nature. He knows how to deal with Keith and guilt and uncertainty. He’s been doing it for years. It is comforting, almost, in its familiarity.

Keith shakes his head, drawing back and rubbing at his face. “I don’t think so. I should have known he wasn’t you.”

“How?” Shiro asks, and he hates, in a way, that Keith is forcing him to take up this side of the argument. In his soul, he’s been saying exactly what Keith is pouring out. They should have known. They should have been able to tell. But. “By all reports, he was just like me. And you had no reason to believe the Galra could clone people.”

“I just should have.” And Keith is wearing the stubborn, mulish expression he used to wear when he insisted that it was his fault his dad died. Shiro sighs, weight dragging at his shoulders.

“You couldn’t have,” he says, the acknowledgment burning in his throat. They couldn’t have. None of them. Keith shakes his head, and Shiro squeezes his arm. “You couldn’t have, alright? And—and you were in his head. You saw what he was. You have every right to feel… whatever. About him. Just because I’m not dead, it doesn’t… change that he is. That he died to save you.” Shiro grimaces. Of all the things he’s had to be reasonable about in his life, this might be his least favorite.

“Yeah?” Keith asks, glancing up, finally.

Shiro forces a smile. It feels cracked. “Yeah.”

Keith studies his expression, looking, no doubt, for a reason to berate himself further. Shiro tries not to provide it. “You’re not… you’re okay with it?”

That might be a bridge too far. Shiro fights a grimace and wins, but only barely. He says, “I understand how you feel.” Or, at least, he’s trying to. That will have to be good enough.

And it must be, because Keith nods and straightens some of the curve out of his back. “Alright,” he says. “Okay. That’s—okay.”

“So, you’re going to stop staring at me like I’m going to explode?” Shiro asks, to make sure that slogging through this conversation was even worth the effort.

Keith tries on a smile. It doesn’t fit quite right, but it’s an improvement over the expression he’s been wearing. He says, “I’ll try.”

#

The day passes in a blur of busy work, after that. Shiro doesn’t share Pidge or Hunk’s genius with mechanical devices, so he mostly gets in their way before leaving them to it. He puts one of the training rooms to use, grabs some food—he does not feel up to a group meal—and, finally, he goes back to his room. It seems futile to continue avoiding it. Sooner or later, he will have to sleep there again. He’s not going to give up his space because someone else stole it. It belongs to him. It always has.

He repeats that to himself when he stands in the hall, jaw clenched so tight in hurts. “Right,” he says, to no one, and he opens the door, and steps inside. It has not changed since his first day back on the Castle. His bed is still a mess, full of pillows and blankets he does not recognize. He turns away from it for the moment, marching to the bathroom.

There are creams in the shower he does not know. They smell good—soft and sweet—like Allura’s hair. He stands there, holding a jar that does not belong to him, his emotions a labyrinth not even he can make it through, and then he shakes himself, hard.

He showers. He gets dressed. He knows the clothes in his drawers. They’re his. But he has to assume the other one wore them. The clone. He wants to dump them across the floor, pile them up, set them on fire. But he’s on the wrong side of the universe from home. He only has so many clothes. He doesn’t want to wear his Paladin uniform constantly.

He stands there in clothes that are his and not his, exhaustion weighing him down, with nothing but the bed left to focus on.

For a moment, he is sorely tempted to sleep on the floor. He’s slept in worse places. But this is his. All of it. He has a right to it. So he folds up the blankets he doesn’t recognize. He stacks the strange pillow on top. He lifts the entire buddle, feeling his skin crawling, and turns, and walks out of the room. He does not realize where he’s going until he ends up in front of Allura’s door, and then he regrets it.

But.

But he doesn’t know where else to take it. He doesn’t want to keep it in his room. And it doesn’t—it feels wrong, to just throw it out, as much as he hates it.

He scowls at the door for a long moment and then squares his shoulders. He’s come this far. He might as well finish it. He raps his knuckles on the door, never used to the clank of metal on metal, and waits. There is no answer. He doesn’t hear anyone moving. It’s a relief, in a way. But he doesn’t want to carry his awkward package _back_ to his room, so he knocks again, and calls, softly, “Princess?”

The door cracks open.

Shiro hesitates, looking at the sliver of darkness beyond. He pushes it a little wider, concerned, suddenly, that something else has gone wrong. “Princess, are you—”

The words die in his mouth, perishing on his tongue. Allura’s room is empty of anything but ghosts. Her bed rests against one wall, upended. There is a dent in the wall from the force with which it was thrown. The blankets pool around it, sad and abandoned. Shiro walks towards it, drawn by sick fascination. He touches one corner, not thinking, and his fingers come away cold.

He shudders, his stomach twisting unpleasantly. It feels like standing in a mausoleum. He wonders where she has been sleeping. Obviously, it has not been in here. He does not blame her. The disarray is an ugly thing, like a wound left open to fester.

Shiro sets his burden down before he has time to think about it. He rights the bed with a grunt, the bang of it is surprisingly loud, but there’s no one around to care. The blankets trail over one side. The pillows remain in a sad pile. He grabs one and shakes it, placing it carefully. He moves methodically, and when he’s finished he stands and stares, wondering what the hell he thinks he’s doing, besides breathing too fast.

Shiro creeps back through the room, as quickly and quietly as he can, afraid of further stirring the presence that lays suffocating in the air.

He wonders if she’ll ever find the bed, or if he’s just leaving a sacrifice to her loss.

The thought haunts him all the way back to his room. It digs at his mind as he remakes his bed and crawls under the sheets. He lays there, curled on his side, and can’t manage to shut his eyes. The room is quiet. Dark. The blankets and mattress are soft. They are _his_. They are.

They smell like Allura. He could wash them, but he doesn’t. As torture goes, at least it is sweet.

#

Allura sleeps fitfully in White’s cockpit, and wakes up with an ache in her neck and itchy eyes. She scrubs at them and uses the Lion’s sensors to check out the hangar, to pick out where everyone else is. They’re in their rooms, probably sleeping. Someone is bunking up with Pidge—she assumes it must be the brother, Matt.

And _he_ is in Shiro’s room.

Allura stares at the screen, a pressure building in her throat that feels like a scream. She is on her feet in an instant, ready to storm down and… and what? Throw him out of the room that by rights belongs to him? All of the ferocity of her anger fades away in seconds, leaving her knees to sag. Bile burns in the back of her mouth. She waves off the scanners, and sets to working on White. She can at least get the cockpit in proper order. She can at least do that.

She is surrounded by circuitry, the handiwork of her father, when Pidge climbs in and clears her throat. Allura braces herself. She does not… want to be around people. Any people. But. She forces a smile and straightens up. “Pidge! How are you this morning?”

Pidge looks around, busy taking in the inside of the cockpit. “Great! Matt’s alive! And here!” She laughs a little, a giggle, really, like she still can’t believe it.

“I am very happy for you,” Allura says, and means it. No one should lose their family. She understands that as well as anyone.

“Thank you,” Pidge says, picking up some of the circuits and sorting them out with quick, clever fingers. “Look. I know you’ve done a lot, to help me find him. Bringing us here. And agreeing to try this plan. And…”

“What do you need, Pidge?” Allura asks. She can feel the request coming, and she’d like to get it over with.

Pidge blushes, hiding behind some circuits. “It’s not me. It’s the Fist. Matt says they’d really like to meet you. They’ve all heard about you and, I don’t know. He says it would mean a lot to them. If you’d come down and talk to them.”

Allura can think of few things she’d like less than putting on a smile and meeting with another group that has heard so much about her. But she knows her responsibilities. She sketches a smile. “Of course,” she says, “just let me get cleaned up.”

#

Shiro steps out of the—his—room and nearly runs directly into Lance, who is hurrying towards the hangar. “Hey,” Shiro calls, frowning, wondering if the Galra caught wind of their plan, if there’s been an attack, if it’s all about to go sideways, “what’s going on?”

“We’re going back to the moon,” Lance yells over his shoulder. “The Fist wants to meet Allura, you coming?”

Shiro says, “Yeah, of course,” before he registers that he doesn’t necessarily want to go. It’s just… instinct. And afterwards he can think of no good way to take back the words. So he readies himself, and he jogs down to the hangar to find everyone waiting for him. They climb into their Lions and travel down. Allura takes White and for a moment Shiro thinks the beast will not respond, but then it stretches and roars, triumphant.

White seems less pleased to be back on the moon. It crouches and snorts, and then settles to one side in what can only be described as a sulk. Allura strokes her hand along its flank, before they are ushered down into the complex. Shiro braces for the mess, for the riotous joy no doubt coiled to unleash all over Allura.

He grits his teeth, takes a step into the tunnel, and jerks hard when the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all suddenly light up.

The light is soft, golden, dimmed by the layer of dust and filth over the walls. It seeps through in intricate patterns that Shiro can recognize as Altean. It flickers, momentarily, like a candle about to gutter out, and then, when Allura takes another step forward, it strengthens and rushes down the tunnel, into the hangar, where Shiro hears sudden shouts.

Allura turns in a slow circle, looking at the walls, the glow sliding across her skin and glittering in her eyes.

The unexpectedness of it takes him by surprise, reminds him, suddenly and viscerally, of how beautiful she is. How powerful. Magical.

“What is going on?” someone yells, from further inside the complex, and it shakes Shiro from the shock of seeing her, clearly, for maybe the first time since he got back.

The glow shines on her hair as they are swept further into the complex.

#

The station wakes around her, warm and familiar. It feels strange, to walk through another Altean construction, to know that her father built it. The knowledge distracts her as a crowd swarms around her. The members of the Fist. They must be.

They look tired. Hungry. Injured. Hopeful. Their clothes are ragged, but their eyes shine. They carry weapons easily, without thought, but they smile freely. They are thin, none of a healthy weight, but they offer her cups and platters of food, nonetheless.

Allura takes the food and drink with words of gratitude that are so automatic she cannot remember what she said afterwards. The alcohol burns unpleasantly, bitter and full of strange… lumps. The food, on the other hand, has no real taste at all. Allura chews and swallows and smiles, swept from one eager conversation to the other.

The day begins to blur at some point, at least partially because of the alcohol. It is a… surprisingly nice feeling. By the time a tremendously tall Galra woman approaches, her smile comes almost freely. “Hello,” the woman says, throwing an arm around Allura’s shoulders, “you’re the princess everyone is talking about. You flying the White Lion now?”

“I am,” Allura agrees. “And you are?”

“They call me Huirice,” she says. “And I fixed that Lion. You want to see something neat?”

“Certainly,” Allura says, and she laughs, just a little, when Huirice pulls her along, towards one side of the room. They weave through the crowd, all of whom feel the need to cheer and toast her. By the time they make it to their destination, at least Allura’s cup is empty. She doesn’t think she could drink anymore of it.

“This is it,” Huirice says, gesturing at a safe set into the wall. It is plain, compared to other safes Allura has seen. It was not designed for beauty, built solely to keep something protected and hidden. The markings on it barely glow. “I’ve been trying to open this for years. Hit it with everything I could think of. Can’t get it to do a thing. Not even Paladin boy could budge it. But—”

Allura isn’t truly listening. The words are just background noise. She stretches her fingers out and traces the edge of the lock, exhaling in surprise when the lights around it pulse, shifting color and racing inward. Mechanisms whirl softly inside the lock and then the covering retracts, sliding open easily, even after all these millennia. 

Huirice makes a choked, surprised sound, but Allura is not paying attention to her. A bayard rests inside the locked space. “What is that?” Huirice asks, reaching out as though to grab. Allura catches her wrist without thought and holds; Huirice jerks but does not manage to free her hand.

Allura takes the bayard in her other hand, turning it over. The tool is familiar and not. Unfinished, just like the White Lion. There is no thrum of power from it. It is inert. Allura frowns, and focuses on it, the same way she focuses on powering the Castle’s wormholes, sending a thread of her energy down to it.

It takes far more effort than she anticipated. The bayard snags at the trickle of power and draws more, so much that she sways, startled. But it shifts to life in her hand, expanding into a glowing sword, the weapon her mind has adopted since—well.

Huirice breathes an awed curse as Allura shifts the sword, looking at it. 

“Holy shit,” Lance blurts, and Allura looks up to find the others crowded around, staring at her, at the bayard, with wide eyes. She blinks and concentrates on stopping its draw on her energy. The bayard falls lifeless immediately, and a wave of dizziness washes over her.

“Princess,” _he_ calls, concerned, and there is a steadying hand on her elbow, the first hint she gets that she was dangerously close to collapse.

Her stomach roils.

“I’m fine,” she says, jerking away from the touch. She doesn’t want—or she wants too much—or— She catches a glimpse of _his_ expression, stung, and her chest aches, but she… She can’t. That’s all. She grimaces and says, “I was simply unprepared for the bayard’s power requirements. It is not… self-contained, like the others.”

“Right,” _he_ says. “Of course.”

And then someone screams with delight from the other side of the room, music kicks up, and the crowd disperses, finding something more interesting to focus on. Allura watches them go with heavy relief, reaching out and bracing a steadying hand against the wall, catching her breath. She startles when Huirice says, “Huh.” She’d thought the woman went with the others.

Allura looks up at her, her cheeks burning at the display of weakness, but Huirice seems unconcerned with it. She says, “You know, he’s a good man. One of the few I’ve found.”

Allura wishes, abruptly, that they _were_ talking about the effects of the bayard. She makes a noncommittal noise, looking for an avenue of escape, and Huirice continues, “And he talked about you all the time, while he was here.”

“Excuse me,” Allura says, because she does not want to have this conversation. She does not want to think about _him_ here, about his life while she thought he was dead. It ties her thoughts in knots that she has no hope of untangling. She makes to move away, ignoring the remaining weakness in her legs. “I have to—”

“And I can smell that there’s something there, from you,” Huirice continues, blunt and terrible, though there is nothing cruel in her expression. She seems more puzzled, than anything. “So what’s with the tension?”

Allura stares at her, too taken aback to simply walk away. Curse the Galra and their astute senses, anyway. She says, into the silence that stretches between them, “It is… I lost someone. While he was here.”

“Ah.” Huirice nods, as though satisfied. “Well. Let’s get you back to the party, then.” And some more of the alcohol suddenly seems like a very good idea, so Allura does not protest.

#

They spend the next several days working on the Fists’ ships, from the time they get up until the time they go to sleep. It’s the third day when, after Shiro’s mechanical hand is temporarily crushed under the weight of one of the ships, Pidge frowns over at him and says, “We can… uh. We can remove that. If you want.”

Shiro stares at her, blanking. “What?”

“The arm.” Pidge points at it. “I know it’s not, like, hooked up to the Galra control network, or anything. But it’s also not working. Right? And we know how to take it off. It’s hard, but we did it without too much damage for… You know.”

“I don’t…” This was not a conversation Shiro had in any way prepared for. He rubs at the arm, undamaged by several tons of weight, and frowns. “I think I’m better off with it, Pidge.”

“Not really,” Pidge says, as though she is not advocating the removal of one of his arms. “I mean…” She does, at least, look incredibly uncomfortable. “I mean, the bayard kind of replaced it. For. You know. He had, like… a glowing arm?” Pidge wrinkles her nose.

Shiro tries to process that. “A glowing arm.”

“Mhm. Hey, stop that!” Pidge refocuses on the upgrades to the ship, smacking one of the Fist’s on the hand when he moves something she just got done arranging. It gives Shiro time to stare at the side of her head, his thoughts slowly working back up to speed.

He says, finally, “The bayard gave the clone an arm?”

“What?” Pidge looks up and blinks, obviously thinking of something else. “Oh. Yes.”

“You knew it would?”

“Uh, no. No, we didn’t know. He didn’t even have a bayard, before that. But he made us take the Galra arm off and then… I don’t know. I wasn’t there when the bayard did the thing. You’d have to ask Allura about it. Or, uh, Keith. You’d probably rather ask Keith, I guess.” Pidge grimaces. “Anyway, just think about it. Let me know when you want us to take it off. Dude, I said stop that!”

Shiro stares at her and then steps back, a chill running down his spine. He doesn’t… he’s only used a bayard once. He hasn’t been in a fight since he got back, and the White Lion _had_ no bayard when he was piloting it. The only time he used one, he ended up transported across the universe, lost while another person with his face took over his life.

He is not sure that he wants to risk using one again. Especially as a part of his body.

He hates the Galra arm and everything it represents, the way they took and manipulated his body, doing what they wanted with it, but…

But it is a known quantity. It functions. He can use it. He can crush it and the fingers will continue to work.

He isn’t confident that the bayard will do the same, regardless of what it did or did not do for the clone.

#

The shields come along better than they hoped, and they get them in working order within the week, in time to receive a message from the Blade saying they won’t be getting any help from that corner. They test them by floating one of the ships without a pilot, and having Red take a shot at it. The ship gets throw, but the shield shimmers around it, distributing the power of the impact. Pidge beams with pride when Matt cheers, and looks slightly green when he suggests another Fist celebration.

“Maybe we should save that for after the attack,” Shiro suggests, and everyone hurries to agree. They learn pretty quickly, his team. So, instead of drinking poisonous alcohol, they spend the evening on their own, private pre-battle rituals. Shiro wanders the Castle. He’s forgotten what his were.

He ends up in the kitchen, where he finds Lance perched on one of the counters, eating a plate full of vaguely gelatinous leftovers. Lance startles when he steps into the room, but manages to catch the food before it splatters everywhere, only choking a little bit. “Don’t judge,” he says, wiping at his mouth, “I’m growing again, or something.”

It’s true enough. Lance was already tall and he’d shot up in the time Shiro was missing, still all gangly limbs, knees and elbows. Shiro shook his head. They hadn’t spoken much, and never alone. Not since he’d come back. But then, he and Lance had never been particularly close. He asks, “Is there anything left?”

“Maybe,” Lance says, cagey, and Shiro snorts. He remembers being hungry all the time at Lance’s age, and he hadn’t been spending all of his time fighting an intergalactic war. He pulls open the machine that Hunk dubbed the space-fridge and peers at the offerings, finally settling on some kind of fruit that he’d eaten without gagging in the past.

He rubs the fruit on his sleeve and leans against the counter, absently watching Lance pick at his food. He takes a bite just in time to choke when Lance blurts, “You have the Jean Grey problem.”

Shiro clears his throat and manages to resume breathing enough to ask, “Excuse me?”

Lance shrugs, pushing food from one side of his plate to the other. “Jean Grey. From the X-Men. You know, one of the best pieces of classical literature we got? Didn’t you go to school?”

Shiro suddenly remembers why he and Lance never hung out much. “I have—what?”

Lance rolls his eyes. “She was this lady who died. Saving a bunch of her friends. Or, I mean, they thought she did. It’s a long story. And this bad guy, Mr. Sinister, cloned her, right? Because he wanted someone with her DNA to—anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is, look, he cloned her, and this clone, Madelyne, ran into the guy Jean Grey loved, and they fell in love, and then Madelyne died, or, look, you know, everyone _thought_ she died, and Jean came back, because she was actually possessed by an alien megaforce and—”

“Lance,” Shiro interrupts, pained, ready to run from the room. He doesn’t need to hear this. Any of this.

“Sorry,” Lance says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have… I just. I keep thinking about it. Sorry. If it means anything, though, Jean and the guy she loved, they figured it out. For a while. Until he had a psychic affair with another lady, and she died again, I think. Full disclosure, I didn’t read that far.”

Shiro stares, trying to take that all in. He says, finally, “I’m surprised you’re telling me this.”

“What, because of how I used to act around Allura?” Lance shrugs, a wistful look passing across his face. “Man, she’s always going to be beautiful, but… I’m obviously not what she’s interested in. So.”

Shiro grimaces. He’s no longer hungry at all. “The person she was interested in died.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Lance rolls his eyes and shoves a violently pink ball into his mouth. “It’s not like he built a relationship from scratch when he showed up. He just picked up where you left off and added kissing, and you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think so.”

Shiro bristles. Of all the people in the Castle, _Lance_ is least qualified to—

“Don’t look at me like that,” Lance says, frowning. “I saw what they were like, and I saw what you two were like. Are like. I see how you look at her. And I’ve been inside her head. I’ve felt all the crap she’s trying to bury. So, yeah, I’m not exactly holding onto a torch here anymore. I can’t live up to _that_. And that’s okay.” He sighs, the irritation draining out of his expression. “Mrril is really nice, so.”

It takes Shiro a moment to find his voice. He feels… chided. He sighs, happy for the change of subject. “Yeah,” he says, “she is. You going down there tonight, to see her?”

Lance looks down, shrugging again. “I don’t know. Do you think I should?”

Shiro shouldn’t be giving anyone relationship advice. Not with the wreck his life has become. But. He says, “Do you want to?”

“Yeah,” Lance finally decides, sliding off the counter and tucking his food back into the space-fridge. “Yeah, I guess I do.” He pauses in the doorway, looking over his shoulder to say, “Good talk. See you bright and early to kick some Galra ass.”

#

The attack goes sideways before it even begins. The Paladins all gather in the hangar to discuss last minute strategy, and when the group breaks apart, for an instant she is left standing beside _him_ , and he is in the armor of the Black Paladin, and she is tired, so tired, not just from her ill-sleep, but from the drain of the bayard quintants ago.

The situation conspires against her, and for a moment muscle memory takes over for her faltering thoughts. She is reaching up towards his face, the way she used to, before the surprise in his expression registers, and she freezes, her fingers a breath away from his unscarred cheek. They stare at one another, and she sees too much in his eyes. 

She looks away first, her arm curling back. She says, “Good luck,” because she can think of nothing else to blurt, and hurries away before he can reply. She can feel him staring after her. She goes to the bridge. There is too much to be coordinated in the battle for her to pilot the White Lion, except in the case of an emergency.

Besides, someone needs to wormhole them in.

They arrive at the refinery as planned. And they attack as planned, as well. Things go perfectly, the Fist fighters swarming around as the Lions hit the big targets. Everything works. For a few ticks. 

And then something huge and monstrous detaches from one of the defense satellites, something with too many arms and too many eyes, and everything goes wrong.

The thing takes out four of the Fist fighters in one attack, their upgraded shields no match for the beams it shoots from its many eyes. “Holy quiznak!” Lance yells over the comms, “what is that?”

“A robeast?” Hunk suggests, crying out in alarm when one of the thing’s tentacles wraps around Yellow’s leg.

“But we haven’t—hgn—Haggar hasn’t made any since—” Pidge cuts off, busy fending off another pair of tentacles.

“Well, I guess she is again,” Keith snaps, diving in to attack the monster directly.

Allura tunes out their chatter. Other things matter more. “Fist pilots,” she shouts, “I am opening a wormhole for you. You must go through it immediately.”

“What?” Pidge’s brother—Matt—shouts back. He is still alive, then. “No, we can help. Voltron needs—”

“Listen to the Princess, Holt, she gave you an order!” _he_ says, Black circling the robeast and earning a blow to the side in the process. 

Allura grits her teeth and powers the wormhole, her relief when the Fist pilots dart through it short-lived. The robeast is tearing into the team, and giving the refinery’s other defenses opportunities they should not have. A blast catches the Blue Lion unprepared and Lance’s scream is cut-off and agonized. Three tentacles snag Black and throttle her, and—

“Take the helm,” Allura orders Coran, spinning on her heel. Maybe she knew it would come to an emergency. She did wear her Paladin uniform. She arrives in the hangar to find White waiting, coiled, ready.

He _does_ handle like the Castle, but probably not in the way that was implied. So many of his systems are not quite finished. She has to hold all of them in her head, to balance them, to fill in the spaces where pieces are missing. Allura’s directions are accepted, understood. Their directness is appreciated. White does not have advice to give, does not have the battle experience of the other Lions. He follows her lead. Allura, racing into a mad battle, feels a sudden rush of contentment, and says, “Alright, let’s see what we can do, you and I.”

#

At least the Fist got away. The thought keeps recurring to Shiro, as the robeast and the entirety of the refinery’s other defenses pound at them. He doesn’t know how _they’re_ going to get out of this, but at least Matt’s people aren’t going to be slaughtered wholesale.

He grunts, pain lashing through him, as the robeast pulls at Black, the tentacles trying to rip her apart. Black bites and claws at what she can reach, but attacks seem to slide off the creature. The others are struggling to stay in the fight, and Shiro can feel things tipping out of their favor. His gut twists, and the robeast wraps a tentacle around Black’s head, squeezing, and—

And the pressure is abruptly gone.

“What—”

“Oh, shit, yeah!” Lance yells, laughing with delight, while Shiro tries to get a handle on what just happened. His mouth falls open at what he finds. The White Lion has leapt onto the robeast’s back, and, as Shiro watches, it unleashes an attack—a second attack?—into the back of the thing’s head. The robeast roars, its tentacles flinging the other Lions away, before all of them turn to the White Lion.

Something hard and cold punches Shiro under the ribs. He shouts, “Princess, get out of there!”

She doesn’t listen. He didn’t even think she would, really. Instead, the White Lion lets loose another blast, even as the tentacles close around it. Allura grunts, pain in the sound and filtering through her voice when she orders, “Attack it! Now!”

Shiro’s first instinct is to dive right in, to tear at the tentacles, but he knows better than that. They need Voltron, and she’s bought them the time to form the great warrior. It feels like coming home, in a way nothing else has. The connection stretches between his mind, the Lions, and the other Paladins, clicking into place perfectly.

He can even feel Allura, he notices, though she is distant through the connection, not tied as tightly as the rest of them. The glow of her draws his attention anyway, his thoughts sliding towards her, driven by raw curiosity and magnetic attraction and—

—and it _hurts_. It feels like absorbing a blow to the kidneys, like being kicked in the teeth. Shiro grunts, not even thinking to draw back in self-defense. Her mindscape, the part of her opened to the rest of them, is raw and damaged, like a bone not just broken but shattered to a thousand shards.

“Stop!” Pidge’s cracking voice cuts through the crushing weight pushing down on Shiro’s chest. She sounds like she’s begging. “Stop, please!”

Shiro shakes himself, scrambling mentally backwards, until he can breathe again, until Allura’s mind is just a distant throb. Voltron is frozen in place, left adrift while he suffocated, and he blinks, breathing shakily. The refinery’s defenses are everywhere. The robeast tries to tear White off of its back, roaring in frustration when the Lion’s paws glow and grow terrible claws and curve down into it like hooks—a skill that Shiro never managed to utilize. It must be tied to the bayard. Allura must have unlocked the ability.

“Alright,” Shiro says, ignoring the wild pound of his heart. “Let’s do this.”

#

In the end, they destroy the robeast and most of the refinery. They leave what’s left floating in space and limp back to the Castle, where they drag themselves from their Lions. Shiro hesitates, for an instant, not sure he is ready to look Allura in the eye. Not after what he felt. But he’s never been a coward. He just faced a monster. He skewered it through the face with a sword. He can handle this.

The others bump and shove at each other, delirious with excess adrenaline and exhaustion, laughing their way out of the hangar. Allura climbs out of White last, and for a moment Shiro thinks she is just trying to avoid the rest of them. He wouldn’t blame her, really. He gets it, now.

But she takes a step and sags, her helmet falling from her fingers, and he realizes he misread the situation.

“Princess!” He steadies her before she can go down, and she is, apparently, bad off enough that she does not try to shrug away from his touch. There is a tremor in her skin. Her breathing is fast, shallow. Alarm spikes through him, washing away everything else for the moment. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

She shakes her head, her hair falling out of her careful bun. He cannot see her face. “I’m just tired,” she says. “The bayard… it is incomplete. It has no power source of its own. It requires a tremendous amount of energy to function.” She shrugs, as though that explanation is at all satisfying.

“I’m taking you to the infirmary,” he says, because she is not well, and he doesn’t know how to make it better.

She flinches, then, recoiling. “No,” she grits out, shaking her head. “No, I don’t want—I don’t need medical care. Just sleep.”

_Allura was with him. In the end_ , Keith told him. Shiro wonders if it was in the infirmary. He tries to imagine holding her in a similar circumstance and his thoughts revolt, shying away from the images. He supposes, with a sick lurch in his chest, that he wouldn’t want to go back to the infirmary after that, either.

“Alright,” he says, softly. “Sleep it is. Come on.”

She is near to sleeping on her feet, he realizes, as he leads her through the halls. She leans harder against his side as they walk, and he does not know how to feel about it. He wonders if she’s tired enough to confuse him for someone else, if that is the only reason she does not protest when he pulls her arm across his shoulders.

It must be. She can’t bear him touching her, any other time.

She stirs when they reach her door, in any case. He feels her jerk, the sudden sharp inhale of her breath when the door opens. “No,” she says, her voice cracking. “Not here.”

He didn’t even think about the obvious abandonment of the room. He should have. He grimaces and waves the door closed. He says, “You need a bed—”

“ _Not here_.”

“Alright.” He nods, hating the too-fast panting of her breath, the shaking that worsens in her limbs. “Alright, Princess. There are plenty of rooms in the Castle.”

And there are. He walks her down the hall until he finds an unoccupied space. It smells faintly stale inside, and the blankets are covered in a layer of space-dust, but she makes no protests when he guides her over to the bed. She climbs on top of the covers, ignoring her armor, curling her limbs up to her chest, all without saying anything.

Shiro stares down, an ache in his throat. He reaches over, not thinking, and grabs the blankets, pulling them across her back. “Shiro,” she mumbles, exhaustion curling around his name even as her fingers curl around his wrist, surprising and soft. It is the first time he has heard her say his name, since he returned. It stings. She looks up at him with shiny eyes, her expression crumpling all at once. She says, broken, “I miss you.”

He knows she doesn’t mean him. Not really. It doesn’t matter, in that moment, with the memory of her agony so close in his mind. He says, “Sh, Princess. I’m right here. Sleep.”

She nods against the pillow and her eyes fall closed. Her fingers relax around his wrist. He doubts, as he straightens the blankets and smooths back her hair, that she will even remember this in the morning. 

He almost wishes he wouldn’t, either.

He wipes her cheeks dry carefully and steps back, walking backwards until his back bumps the wall. He slides down slowly to his haunches, watching her. He will stay, he decides, just for a while. Just to make sure she really is just tired, that nothing more serious is going on. He will watch over her, just for a bit.


	4. Chapter 4

The headache wakes Allura, grinding through bone in the middle of her forehead and up through the back of her neck. She groans, squinting her eyes open, and freezes.

She is not in the White Lion. She can’t remember why. At first, she thinks she is in Shiro’s bed, but… the pillow is wrong. And surely she was not tired or foolish enough to go there.

She sits up all at once, ignoring the way it worsens the pain in her head. Blankets slide off of her back, and she blinks down at her gloved hands, grimacing. Sleeping in the Paladin uniform is terribly uncomfortable, it seems. She rubs at her head, trying to put together how she got from the White Lion to this room, and a soft snore nearly makes her jump out of her skin.

Allura turns slowly, cautiously, towards the sound. The bed, at least, is empty save for her. The room is not.

_He_ is asleep against the wall, his arms crossed and his chin dipping down towards his chest. He’s still wearing his uniform. His hair is flattened and hanging forward. Allura stares at him, vague memories flittering down through the headache. Using the bayard exhausted her, she remembers that. She has flashes of an arm around her waist, of her room, of careful hands pulling a blanket over her.

He did that. All of that.

Allura lurches to her feet, the pound of pressure in her temples muting any attempt at thought. She can’t seem to stop staring at _him_. He snores softly, again, twitching in his sleep, and she shudders. 

The blanket drags across the floor when she pulls it off the bed. She drapes it across him as well as she can, though she knows, from experience now, that the Paladin uniforms keep you warm enough. He does not stir, and she stares for a moment, feeling her pulse banging against her temples like a drum.

And then she turns, blinking aside the blurriness in her eyes. She needs breakfast. And possibly to speak with Coran about this headache.

#

Coran frowns at the readouts from the medical scans while Allura leans against her station on the bridge. He had been understanding enough to check on her there, instead of insisting on a visit to the infirmary. “Well?” she asks, when he says nothing for a long moment.

“Well… I think you’re right, and that the pain and exhaustion are tied to your use of the White Lion and its bayard. The energy demands are immense. Even for an Altean.” He looks over at her, his mouth dragging downwards in the corners. “It’s my recommendation that you not use it again. The stress on your neural pathways was too great.”

Allura looks away, because she does not like to see disappointment on his face. She says, “You know I can’t promise you that. The team needed my aid yesterday.”

“And they’re going to need you to fly the Castle,” he says. “Which you won’t be able to do, if—”

“There you are.” Pidge interrupts then, tumbling through the door, Keith on her heels, her hair a mess and a cup of something steaming hot in her hand. “We need to talk. Where’s everyone else?”

#

Shiro wakes to someone pounding on a door. He startles, tangled in a blanket he does not remember grabbing. He does not even remember falling asleep. The last he knew, he was watching Allura, worried because—

He jerks his head up and finds the bed empty. The blanket is currently caught on his arm. He shakes it free, lost between dreams and waking when he calls, “What?”

“We’re having a meeting,” Hunk calls back through the door. “I guess. I don’t know. They sent me to get you, and they said it was important, but, honestly, getting enough sleep is also—oh, hey.” Hunk waves when Shiro opens the door, only leaning a little against the frame. His body aches from the uncomfortable position he slept in. His thoughts are blurry.

“What meeting?” he asks, trying to rub feeling back into his face.

“I don’t know, man. Pidge just yelled at me to get you, so I did.” That’s the best explanation Shiro can get out of him, all the way to the common room, where the others are already waiting, mostly sitting on the couches, though Lance is sprawled across one arm, only half-awake at best. Allura is still wearing her armor. Shiro looks her over without thinking—there are bags under her eyes, but she’s up and moving under her own power, so there’s been an improvement to her condition.

She glances up at him, probably feeling his attention, and he looks away, wondering what she remembers, if anything. He says, “Morning. I hear we’re having a meeting?”

“Mm,” Pidge says, pacing in front of the couches, full of more energy than the rest of the room combined. Shiro just wishes it didn’t look so nervous. She says, “I think, and Keith agrees, that we need to ask ourselves why the robeast was there yesterday. We don’t mean in general. We mean specifically at the refinery. Waiting for us.”

Shiro blinks. This wasn’t what he was expecting. Half of his brain is still asleep. But the rest can pick up on what she’s insinuating easily enough. He says, “You think they knew we were coming.”

Keith nods. “We think it’s a safe bet, yeah.”

Allura shifts forward, frowning, worry darkening her eyes. “How?”

Pidge shrugs, still pacing. “We don’t know. Maybe some Galra patrol picked us up in the area around the Fist’s base and figured the refinery had the highest threat profile. Or, I don’t know. I mean….” Pidge trails off with a wretched look, fiddling with her sleeves.

Keith picks up for her, scowling. “She means, or maybe someone told them we were going to be there.”

There is a moment of terrible silence while they all turn that over. Lance sits up, both of his eyes open now, his expression pulling tight. “Someone like who?” he asks.

Keith shrugs. He’s turning his dagger over and over in his hands. “A Fist member? Maybe someone in the Blade? Who know. I think we’ve forgotten that spies can be used by _both_ sides. Effectively.” He pointedly does not look towards Shiro.

Shiro frowns, ignoring the reminder that someone with his face betrayed the others, at least for a while. “I know the Fist. I don’t believe they’d betray us.”

Keith looks up, unhappiness in his expression. “You trust all of them? After a few months?”

Shiro almost insists that, yes, he does, but the words die in his mouth. He can’t say that. Not really. People lie, especially in a war. And, if they know the Galra can clone people, they have to assume that anyone could be a sleeper agent, feeding intel back to the Empire against their will, without ever knowing it.

“I think he’s right,” Allura says, surprising Shiro. He stares at her while she stares at nothing, her hands folded and her eyes tired. “I don’t think it was the Fist. But you may be right about the Blade. There was… a message.” She blanches and her voice wavers, for a moment. “While you were on the moon, initially. Lotor sent it on the Blade’s channel.”

A bad feeling runs down the back of Shiro’s neck, even as Keith bristles, demanding, “What? Why didn’t you tell us?”

Allura’s expression shutters down tight. She says, flat, “It was… personal in nature.”

Lance arches up his eyebrows and asks, “Personal how?”

“It’s not relevant right now,” Allura says, her mouth pinched, the words clipped. “What _is_ relevant is that we must consider any intel shared with the Blade and the Fist to be compromised. That includes the location of the Fist’s base.”

There is a beat of silence as they all process that. Pidge gets there first. She says, numb, “We have to move them, they could be in danger. We need to handle this right now.” She jerks to her feet.

“Yes,” Allura says, standing as well and looking around the room. “Unless anyone disagrees?”

Shiro nods, worry for Matt and all the others punching into his gut. “Let’s go get them.”

#

They file out, Allura to the bridge, Pidge to contact Matt, the others to prepare for the worst. Shiro watches them go, lingering by the door, the better to snag Coran’s arm when he bustles from the room. He doesn’t hold on. It would be rude, and, besides, Coran could throw him through the wall if he really wanted to. Shiro just asks, quietly, after Hunk turns the corner and disappears, “Personal how?”

Coran gapes, and for a moment Shiro thinks he will blather out some new poorly devised excuse. But then something in his expression shifts to fear, sadness. He sighs, and says, keeping his voice quiet, “I… It was a proposal.”

Shiro’s thoughts grind to a stop. Whatever he was anticipating, it wasn’t that. He says, trying to make the idea make sense, “A proposal. Like, for marriage?”

Coran nods, twisting his hands together. He looks miserable. But he keeps talking. “Yes. A political match, I suppose. Not unheard of on Altea. He said he wanted to end the conflict by symbolically joining the Galra Empire to the ideals of Altea, as symbolized by the princess.”

Ice runs down Shiro’s spine, sublimated a moment later by a rush of hot anger carried by his blood. He’s never met this Lotor guy, but he likes him less and less by the moment. He asks, working to keep his tone even and mostly succeeding, “And she believed him?”

Coran snorts. “Oh, thank the gods, no. Of course, it didn’t help his cause that he ended the message by threatening the rest of you implicitly. But, even if he hadn’t. He killed… you know. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive him for that. Even if she thought he was proposing the marriage in good faith.”

Shiro turns that over, slots it into what he knows of the world. Lotor killed the—his clone. Lotor has an unseemly interest in the Princess. He’s beginning to think he’d really, really like to meet the guy, preferably on the field of battle. He says, frowning and working to relax his fists, “I’m surprised you’re telling me this.”

“I probably shouldn’t be. But I worry about her,” Coran says, guilt written all over his face. “And his interest is… She didn’t respond well to it. And she’s—I promised King Alfor I would look after her, you know? His only daughter. All he had left. And I could pretend I could do that, while she stayed on the Castle. But she’s out fighting space battles now, cavorting around on a Lion with a broken bayard. I can’t follow her out there.” He shrugs miserably.

Shiro considers that from all angles. He says, quiet, so that Coran does not have to, “But I can.”

“Yes.” Coran looks up at him, unhappiness etched into his features, along with the weight of expectation. “You can. And I know she’d be angry with me about this. I know I might be wrong to ask you to, after everything that’s happened. But….”

“I get it,” Shiro says, because he does. He got it yesterday, when Allura jumped on the back of a gigantic monster and took the brunt of its anger to give them the time to kill it. He got it before that, when she put the Castle between Voltron and certain death. He got it when she grabbed him and threw him to safety, leaving herself to the Galra’s tender mercies. He gets it and he shudders. “I won’t let you down.”

Coran squeezes his shoulders, smiling with sad eyes when he says, “I know.”

#

Pidge gets no response to her message, no matter how many times she sends it, her voice getting higher and shakier in each iteration.

By the time they arrive at the moon, they all have some idea what they’re going to find.

That doesn’t make it easier.

Debris litters the space around the moon. Familiar debris. The Caste’s scanners helpfully provide notes on the composition of the ship fragments, but it is a cold confirmation of what they can all see for themselves. The Fist’s ships were cut apart, torn to shreds when Allura thought she was sending them to safety. Allura holds in a trembling breath, gripping the controls tight, holding her body still. 

“What—?” Pidge asks, stunned, her eyes wide. Hunk touches her shoulder, quietly, while her fingers fly across the controls. “I don’t—Matt? I don’t—”

“This isn’t… all the ships,” Coran says, from his station. “There isn’t enough, ah, debris. It’s maybe… half. Half-ish.”

“Where are the rest?” _he_ asks, staring at the devastation before them.

“I’m not sure, they could be—”

“What about the base?” Pidge interrupts, jerking to her feet. “Maybe they’re there. Maybe they’re hiding.” She turns on her heel and runs, and the brief look Allura gets of her face is terrible.

They all follow her, without needing to be told.

From above, the moon’s surface looks unchanged. But no one responds to their hails. Not all the way down through the thin atmosphere. Allura jumps out of White once they land—Pidge has beaten them all down, and no one should be left alone, who knows what they’ll find—and finds the blast door protecting the base standing open.

Pidge stands in front of it, her shoulders shaking, the others approaching her slowly. “Pidge,” _he_ says, quietly, reaching out to her. “I’m—”

Pidge dodges his touch, running down the tunnel headlong. She yells, “Matt!” as she runs, over and over again.

“Shit,” Keith hisses, following her before any of the rest of them can move. “Pidge, wait! There could be traps!” She doesn’t listen. Maybe she doesn’t hear him. The two of them disappear, easily tracked by the sound of her voice. Lance rushes after, calling a name Allura does not recognize.

Allura walks down the tunnel in a daze. The lights are dimmed, barely flickering at her presence. Blaster marks score the walls. There are—there are bodies. Some of them are Galra soldiers. Others are… not. She kneels by a man who filled her plate with food he couldn’t really afford to share, his fur matted with purple-black blood, and closes his eyes, arranging his hands, an automatic response to the dead.

The others move around her, looking for signs of life they’re not going to find. Allura stands again, drifting further into the complex, drawn by the Pidge’s siren-loud wail for her brother. She just found him. How could they have allowed this to happen? Why didn’t they realize this sooner—while there was time to do something about it—why—

_He_ is near the middle of the large central chamber, struggling to lift one of the Fist. Allura recognizes her. Huirice. The Galra woman who showed her the bayard. Allura hurries her steps, her heartrate speeding up, because maybe—

“She’s still alive,” _he_ says, managing to lift Huirice, despite their differences in size. “She’s still breathing. If we—”

“Give her to me,” Allura orders, and he obeys without argument. Allura slides an arm under the woman’s shoulders, her legs, and lifts her easily. She cannot tell that the woman is breathing, but she will not argue it. Not when someone’s life is at stake. “Look for others, I will return for them as quickly as I can,” she snaps, running back out of the tunnel. “Coran, we have injured inbound! Prepare the infirmary!”

She carries Huirice into White and settles her as gently as possible before throwing herself into White’s chair. She goes. If there are other injured, someone else will have to bring them. She cannot risk another death by hesitating.

#

Shiro feels the ground shake when White lifts off, carrying Huirice away. He hopes they were in time. He moves through the other bodies quickly, hoping, pleading with any force that might be listening. He finds no other living souls. Not in the main hangar room, where Lance falls to his knees, reaches shakily for a necklace Shiro knows belonged to Mrril. He does not see her body.

Nor does he find anyone living in any of the halls he moves down or rooms he pushes into, save Hunk, a hand braced on the wall, close to hyperventilating and fighting against it. Shiro squeezes his shoulder, and, after a second, Hunk looks up and gives him a shaky nod.

There is blood everywhere, spattered on the walls and floors, on the few possessions the Fist managed to call their own. Shiro straightens bodies as he goes, absently, wiping blood off of prized possessions, keeping a frenzied count of the dead in the back of his head.

There are not enough bodies. People are missing. Maybe they got away. Maybe not.

He keeps going, running on some terrible auto-pilot, until he reaches the last room in the complex. It does not take long. The building is not very large.

He draws to a startled stop in the doorway. Pidge is standing in the middle of the room, her body held awkwardly, as though the strings that normally keep her up have all been cut. Keith hovers nearby, his expression tight and pained, his hands curled into fists. Matt is not in the room. Matt was not anywhere in the base.

Shiro clears his throat and takes a careful step forward. He says, “Pidge. Pidge, you okay?”

She looks up. Her face is wet with tears she does not seem aware of. She says, quietly, “This is our fault. _My_ fault. If I had just listened to you—you said attacking the refinery was a bad idea. You said. You said.”

“Hey, Pidge, no,” Shiro says, keeping his cadence soft and smooth. He approaches slowly; she looks like she might either collapse or bolt.

“I was supposed to take care of him when I found him,” she says, not really looking at anything. “We were supposed to be okay. I was supposed to take him back to Mom. And I—look what I—he’s—”

“He’s not here,” Keith says, moving in from the other direction. “I looked. He’s not… any of these.”

Pidge cocks her head towards him, but her eyes don’t focus. “Then he didn’t even make it down here. He’s in one of those ships in orbit. He’s in pieces. In space. He’s—”

“Stop it!” Keith snaps, grabbing her shoulders and giving her a shake that makes Shiro wince. Her head jerks unpleasantly. Keith is stronger than most of the rest of them, a by-product of his Galra heritage. Usually he remembers and checks himself. “You don’t know that. Okay? He could still be—he could be fine, okay? Coran said that all of the ships weren’t destroyed. He could be alive. But that won’t matter if you’re convinced he’s not.”

Pidge blinks and some hint of color creeps back into her face. She visibly rallies, nodding, straightening her glasses. “Right,” she says, “you’re right. I just need to—to think about this logically. Thank you.” She sniffs, scrubbing at her face.

Shiro nods at Keith over her head, and Keith grimaces back.

#

Allura carries Huirice through the Castle, barely feeling the weight. She is not sure Huirice is actually alive, until they walk through the doors to the infirmary—Allura does not let herself hesitate, though her heart revolts—and Huirice gurgles weakly, “Where?”

Coran is over by the pods, prepping one for emergency use. He says, “I’m almost done calibrating it for a Galra, put her on a table so we can monitor her vitals!” 

Allura nods, though he isn’t looking, settling Huirice down gently, picking the table with care, far away from where she lost— She says, “You’re safe now. You’re on the Castle of Lions.”

Huirice waves one hand through the air before dropping it. There is a distressing rattle in her chest. Blood mats up the fur on her neck and face. She asks, “Others?”

Allura swallows and decides there are some answers Huirice does not need immediately. She focuses, instead, on getting answers, because while Huirice is awake they must take advantage of it. There is no guarantee that she will survive. “Who did this to you? Do you remember?” Allura sets her jaw, cold stone filling her gut, and asks, “Zarkon?”

“We’re ready,” Coran says, “bring her quickly, her vitals are terribly weak.”

“No,” Huirice gasps. She grabs onto the front of Allura’s armor and holds on, leaving smears of blood behind. Allura covers her hand, leaning close to hear the soft words. “Not. Didn’t recognize… leader. Tall. Smelled Galra, but no… fur. White hair. Like yours.”

Allura flash-freezes, all the living warmth in her body drained out at once. She says, through suddenly numb lips, “Lotor.”

“Princess,” Coran calls, strain in his voice, “we’re running out of time, we need to get her in before her heart stops!”

Allura’s mind snaps back, yanked from the downward spiral Lotor threw her into. She snaps, “In a tick! Huirice, how did they get in? How did they get the blast door open?” There’d been no sign of marks on the barrier, after all. They hadn’t forced their way in.

Huirice’s eyes widen, then. She almost manages to rise off of the table. She gasps, “Paladin boy…”

And it is kind of her to worry, but they do not have the time for it. She is fading. Allura can see it. She says, “He’s fine, please, you must tell me—”

Coran grabs her arm, squeezing hard. “Princess, there is no more time!”

Allura growls, tempted by the thought of ignoring him—they _need_ this information—but it is not worth a life. “Fine!” She lifts Huirice again and bears her to the pod, which slides shut over Huirice’s face, sealing her and her secrets away. Allura slaps the front with the palm of her hand, checking her strength so as not to break it, and yells, “Quiznak!”

Her mind buzzes unpleasantly. She’s breathing too hard. She spins on her heel, needing to be anywhere but in the infirmary, needing something to busy her hands with. Coran calls, “Where are you going?”

She does not look back when she says, “To see if the others need help.”

#

“Guys?” Hunk asks, quietly. He stands in the doorway, one hand braced on the wall, his color still faintly green. He’s studiously avoiding looking at the bodies in the room. “So, I was, um, I was wondering what we should… do with them. I mean. Do they have, um, families we should tell? Something?”

Shiro stares at him. Hunk is a good kid. Too good to be a soldier, probably. He’s standing there, worrying about the dead while the rest of them race onward, moving past the loss because they know no other way to handle it. He says, quietly, “The Fist was their family.”

“Oh,” Hunk says. “Well, then. Should we… bury them? Give them space funerals? I don’t—do you know what they’d want?”

“We’ll bury them,” Shiro says, because they deserve that much. He squeezes Hunk’s shoulder. It is the least and the most they can do for those fallen in battle. “Why don’t you work with Pidge and Keith on some… graves. And Lance, if you can find him. I can handle the bodies.”

Hunk nods, backing out of the room. Pidge follows on his heels, her face still streaked with red. Keith sighs, kneeling and lifting one of the bodies. He says, when Shiro starts to protest, “Don’t be stupid. Come on. Let’s do this.”

#

They carry the dead up out of the bunker and place them carefully in the long gouges Yellow and Green placed in the moon’s surface. Allura and Lance join them, not requiring instruction or explanation. They all work in silence. Shiro stares down at the faces of the people who took care of him, who shared food with him, who counted on him, who he let down.

By the time they are finished, his armor is dirty with blood and filth, but the bunker is empty of bodies. They cover them all carefully, and they mark each grave with whatever they have to hand. It is not pretty, but.

But at least they are not left abandoned in the open.

“There,” Keith says, when they have marked the last of the graves. “That’s all of them.”

Shiro nods. No one else says anything. They just climb into their Lions and leave behind the desecration that they brought on the moon and its inhabitants.

#

“So,” Lance says, quiet and flat, when they climb from their Lions in the hangar. His head is low and his arms are crossed. He has not looked up, not once since they set foot on the moon. Mrril’s necklace is wrapped around his wrist. It is all in different shades of blue, her favorite color. “What do—what do we do now? How do we find out who did this?”

“It was Lotor,” Allura says. She is staring forward, her arms crossed, her eyes shadowed.

“What?” Keith jerks his head up, his voice too loud. “How do you know that?”

Allura shrugs. She says, “Huirice. She told me, before we had to put her healing tank.”

“And you didn’t think to tell us before now?” Keith sounds somewhere between confused and angry.

Allura blinks, finally. She looks numb, distant. She says, almost puzzled, “No. I didn’t.”

It steals the wind from Keith’s sails, and sets off a hum of alarm through Shiro’s veins. He thought her eerie distance on the moon was related to dealing with the dead. His assumption may have been mistaken.

“Why would he—?” Lance starts and then shakes his head, laughing bitterly. “Because we were here, right? Because they helped us. That’s reason enough, isn’t it?”

“What about the people we didn’t find?” Pidge asks, quiet. Her hair has fallen over her face, but her voice sounds steady. “Do we think he took them, then? Is that a possibility? Why would he do that?”

Hunk shudders and says, “Maybe he wants something.” Ice digs frozen claws into the space around Shiro’s vertebrae. He glances at Allura, the stone in his stomach growing heavier. He has a terrible understanding of what Lotor might want. He drifts a step closer to her without thought, needing to be within arm’s reach, just in case.

Keith scoffs, “You mean, besides our heads?”

Lance fiddles with Mrril’s necklace. He says, “Look, if he wanted something, why didn’t he leave, I don’t know, a ransom note, or something? ‘Turn over your Lions or I’ll space your loved ones,’ you know?”

“Maybe he wants us to suffer for a while.” Pidge’s suggestion is met with grim silence. Shiro still doesn’t know enough about Lotor to take at guess at likely motivations. He is beginning to see that he needs to fix that, as quickly as possible.

Keith touches Pidge’s elbow and says, “Or maybe he’s not ready for us yet. Maybe if we find him quickly enough we can take him.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I can run some scans,” Pidge says, but she doesn’t sound hopefully about it.

“I’ll help,” Allura says, firmly, and the two of them sweep from the room, followed by Hunk and then the others. Shiro lingers, turning his gaze to Black. He needs answers. He has since he got back. About Lotor. About the clone. He’s put it off, delayed, hoping that maybe, somehow he’d get out of it. But that’s not going to happen, and now Lotor has taken Matt.

And he wants Allura.

Shiro’s jaw tightens and he nods once before climbing back into Black.

#

“Alright,” Shiro says, bracing back against the pilot’s seat, unsure exactly how this is going to go, but sure it’s not going to be pleasant. He takes a breath and tenses, like he’s ready to take a punch. “Show me.”

He finds he did not prepare enough.

Black slip-slides into his mind, her memories not really playing out. They just arrive, fully formed, forcing him to understand them in their entirety. There is no slow path from beginning to end. No time for him to process one thing, then the next. She gives him all of it, and for a moment he does not think he will be able to handle it, that he will be driven mad.

Shiro-Black sees another person with his face, sitting in the pilot’s chair where he is and isn’t. He _feels_ himself, bright and pure and strong—the way Black sees him, he realizes with a sick sideways lurch—and he feels something else, too. Another presence, layered over the mind Black knew and wanted, insidious and sour. He sees Black recoil, unsure and displeased. He sees the other him give up and leave, shoulders slanted down, head heavy.

Shiro-Black sees the man with his face walking through the hangar, passing in front of the Lions, the unwelcome presence absent from his mind. He has only one arm, something that Black did not notice; physical form does not concern her. She is happy, anyway, that he is only himself again, so pleased she cannot help but respond immediately—he is her Paladin, the one she chose for herself, the one she waited for.

The man looks up at her with awe and hesitant joy on his face. Strange scars cover one side of his face and neck, red and angry and new. His stunned, disbelieving pleasure hits Shiro-Black, and the strangeness of feeling it strangles the breath from Shiro-Black’s chest.

Shiro-Black sees the man standing in the hangar, wearing his armor. Allura’s hand rests on his cheek, over the scars. He is leaning down, hands resting gentle, reverent, on her hips. One glows with faint white light. They kiss, once softly and then with more force, before Allura rocks back. She says, “Be careful,” and she stares up at Shiro-Black after he goes.

Shiro-Black sees the man in battle, feels his fear and determination, feels the terrible realization that he will need to die, to save everyone else. It hits Shiro-Black like a spear, she does not want to lose her pilot, but she recognizes that this thing must be done. It is the only way. She is proud of him, proud that he is hers.

Shiro-Black sees the man stumble into the cockpit and collapse. Shiro-Black’s sensors report that his organs are failing. He is dying. He is alone and—and then he is not. Allura runs into the cockpit, her expression a wild, broken thing when she drops by him. She pulls off his helmet. Her hands shake when she touches him. She lifts him like he is made of glass.

He does not see the man die. But Shiro-Black feels it, an abrupt severing of the connection to her Paladin, a cessation of the stream of pain she’d been feeling. She feels fury, hurt, loss, confusion. Things she does not remember feeling for millennia.

Shiro-Black sees Allura, standing before him in her armor, a black helmet over her head. Shiro-Black reaches out for her and feels an echo of every emotion drowning her. Allura holds the bayard of the Black Paladin. She says, a challenge and a plea wrapped together, “Well?” And Shiro-Black calls her in. Together, they will take their vengeance for what was stolen from them.

The memories overfill him, overwhelm him. But then they stop, a river dammed. He gasps, falling forward, caught awkwardly against the controls as he struggles for breath. He slides to the floor, hands gripped around his head, trying to hold the bones together. “Ah,” he wheezes out, a scream that gets smothered in his tight throat, “ah, ah.”

The overload fades, eventually. His racing thoughts slow to a speed that can be tracked, and then slow further. He blinks and does not see blinding white. He finds that he is curled tight on his side. There is blood under his fingernails and itchy under his nose. His stomach is a single twisted cramp.

But he understands now, finally.

He stands on shaky legs, wiping absently at the blood on his face.

He understands everything.


	5. Chapter 5

Shiro intends to go to the bridge, to tell the others that he gets it, now. He understands why they accepted the other Shiro. He understands the hole carved in their lives. He’s figured it out, had the explanation poured into his head. But he doesn’t make it that far.

His thoughts get blurry and vague. He finds himself standing in the hallway, not sure where he was trying to go, what he was trying to do. He’s so tired. It was… an extreme amount of information to take in. And humans weren’t built for psychic conversations. He drags his feet along, looking for a place to get horizontal. 

He pushes at a door that feels correct and blinks at the room. It isn’t his. But it _also_ isn’t occupied. Good enough. He shuffles over to the bed and falls forward. The mattress catches him. He feels over-hot, but can’t bring himself to struggle free of his armor. He’s so tired. He just needs to sleep. Just for a little while. Just for a few moments.

He closes his eyes.

He sleeps.

Only some of the dreams he dreams are his own.

#

They find no sign of Matt in the wreckage around the moon, no matter how many scans they run. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Pidge says, not looking away from her screens. “He could have escaped. Or been taken. Or… who knows. And I can’t find any sign of where Lotor went, so…” She shrugs.

“We’ll find them,” Hunk says, stifling a yawn. It has been a long day, for all of them.

“Sure.” Pidge shrugs. “I just hope we’re in time.”

“You can’t do anymore this quintant,” Allura says, looking them over. They lack her stamina. “And there is no more to do. I will take us to a safe location, and we can continue our search once we are rested.”

Pidge opens her mouth as though she intends to protest, but Keith touches her shoulder and shakes his head, just a little. “Alright,” Pidge says, frowning. “That’s—I could use a shower, I guess.”

“We all could,” Hunk agrees, and one by one, they file off of the bridge. Allura watches them go and then jumps the Castle to a location with no Galra ships around—somewhere they have not mentioned to the Blade, just in case. And then she begins her scans.

When fingers curl around her wrist, she jumps, expecting—

But it is Coran who says, quietly, “They’re not the only ones who need rest, Princess.”

“I’m fine,” Allura says, gently pulling her arm free.

“A quintant ago, that bayard nearly put you in—”

“I’m fine,” Allura repeats, cutting off the sentence before he can finish. He grimaces, flushing beneath his mustache. She feels an immediate swell of guilt. He is only trying to help. She knows that. And he is not wrong. She sighs. “But I will go and rest. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

That is the easy part. The problem comes after she leaves the bridge. She does not know where to go. She needs to bathe, badly. Blood and sweat and filth have made a mess of her. But she will not go to her old quarters. She cannot go to _his_. 

And then she remembers the room she woke up in. It is as good an option as any. 

#

Allura waves the door open and freezes. _He_ is sprawled over the bed, face down. One of his legs isn’t even on the mattress. His helmet looks like it rolled away from him. He still wears his armor. For a moment, Allura thinks he is not breathing. She crosses the room and bends to check before she can think better of it.

He breathes, but his skin is sallow. There is blood dried under his nose, scratches under the close-shaved hair around his ears. There are purple-ish bruises under his eyes. He looks like—he looks terrible. Allura stares, her pulse thrumming too quickly, jerky and uneven. She grabs the blanket, abandoned near the door, and brings it back, draping it over him. She dims the lights. 

She does not know what else to do. Her hands itch to draw a bowl of warm water, to wash away the blood, to coax the soreness from muscles, to—

But that is not hers. Not anymore. Her Shiro died. She shakes her head, covering her mouth with the back of her hand and bending. Nausea rises in her throat and she swallows it back. She should go. Leave. But he looks so weak. He is defenseless. If Lotor has an insider with the Blade, he could conceivably gain access to the ship again.

He could come into this room. He could—

She cannot leave. She does not know how to stay. Her back bumps against the wall and she shudders. Dirt flakes off of her glove against her mouth. She grimaces, and the idea of a bath beckons, a temporary solution to her problems. She flees into the bathroom.

It is a mistake, one that she only realizes after she is standing under the water, her armor stacked haphazardly outside the shower. She remembers, too well, standing under the spray with her Shiro, his hands—flesh, metal, light—soft over skin and bruises. She remembers the shape of his scars, the curve of his musculature—heavier than most Alteans—the way his hair seemed a liquid itself when wet. 

She slaps a hand over her mouth, the first sob a surprise. Her other hand slides across the wet wall. She can’t find enough support to stay upright, and her shoulder hits the wall; it is cold when she slides down. Her hair tangles around her face, heavy and mixing with the water to choke her. She _needs_ him, but he is gone, but he is _right out there_ , and—

And White reaches for her, his worry and affection pushing aside some measure of the crushing pressure. She sets her teeth against her knuckles, drawing on the Lion’s offered strength to shut away the useless weight of emotion. She pushes it all down, until she can breathe and stand again, moving slowly through the rest of her shower, as though afraid of disturbing the knot of pain.

She feels no better after she climbs out, but at least she is clean. She dresses in a plain dress, delivered by the mice, if a soft chitter is anything to go by. They have largely avoided her, since—

Well. She dresses and steps back into the main room. _He_ sleeps still. She checks to ensure he is breathing still and knows she should leave. But. But he seems defenseless. It dredges up memories of her Shiro, after they removed the Galra arm, the way he looked small and pale and wrong, laying in the infirmary bed.

Allura shudders and crosses to the other side of the bed. She climbs on carefully and curls onto her side along the very edge, where she can stare at his back, measuring the miniscule rise and fall of his ribs. She will make sure he keeps breathing. She will ensure no harm comes to him while he is unconscious. She can’t bring herself to do anything else.

Sleep creeps up on her like a thief. It sends her down to terrible, fitful dreams, disturbed when the bed shifts. Her eyes snap open—her sleep is never deep, not anymore—to find _him_ stirring, slow and clumsy. She rolls from the bed and scrambles back, feeling electrified. She grabs her armor and sprints from the door, ignoring the sleep-rough sound of his voice when he mumbles, “Allura?”

#

The bed is warm and rumpled beside him. Shiro frowns at it, sleep and continued exhaustion clogging up his thoughts. The bed is warm and someone ran from the room. Someone with pale hair. He drags his fingers across the sheets where she laid, trying to understand what happened. He passed out and, what? She came in and covered him up? Slept beside him? And ran, when he awoke?

He shivers, the grafted memories of the Black Lion filtering through his thoughts, alongside the heaviness of what he felt from her through the Paladin connection. 

If sleeping beside him eased any of that, he does not begrudge her the relief. He just wishes she hadn’t ran. He sighs, scrubbing at his face and grimacing when blood flakes off. His stubble itches. The last day had been long and brutal and he should have washed it off before sleeping. He stands to address the issue and feels more human once he is finished.

He finds the others on the bridge. Allura avoids his gaze, and he doesn’t push it. She’s been through enough. She doesn’t need him bringing up where she slept in front of anyone else. Pidge spots him after that and pulls him over to discuss strategies for finding Lotor and the morning clicks into place, carrying them away from the disaster of the previous day.

The night before, Shiro had been sure that he needed to explain to the others what he’d done with Black, but that urge feels distant, after some sleep. He did not learn anything they didn’t already know. Telling them that he’s caught up, it doesn’t—it only draws attention to the time he lagged behind, to how long he let his feelings get in the way of getting answers.

And there is a part of him that feels like a voyeur, in the metaphorical light of day. No one else should have seen Allura’s face when she found the other Shiro. It wasn’t meant for him, or for anyone but the two of them. Of all that he saw, he wishes most that he could give that image back.

But he can’t. So he keeps his revelations private, and they all focus on their current problems. It is the best he can do.

#

They don’t find Lotor. Not for weeks. They end up sidetracked, attacked by another robeast, growing further distrustful of the messages they receive from the Blade. They strengthen their coalition, in the intervening days, fighting to defend the territory they’ve reclaimed and to free additional systems, and all of the time the people they are missing eat away at them.

Allura does not sleep beside him again; she still avoids him, except when forced onto the field of battle. There they work together as well as they ever did, the flickering impressions of her thoughts the only way he can assess her feelings.

Mostly, she seems exhausted.

And there is a problem with the White Lion, or the bayard, or both. She does not mention it, but she is ever unsteady after piloting the Lion. On her third outing, capillaries in her right eyes burst, turning the white to red. She masks it, after Lance comments with alarm, but it is not healed—just hidden by her chameleon abilities. Shiro knows because he catches it, sometimes, over the next few days, when she forgets to keep up the façade.

He tries to ask about it, but she only tells him that it is fine, skittering her gaze away from his. He lets it go. What else can he do?

He asks Huirice about it, when he visits the infirmary to check on her. He tries to go once a day, though Coran tells him that her injuries were severe enough that he cannot even estimate how long they will take to heal. If not for the redundant circulatory system of the Galra, Huirice would have, apparently, been long dead before they arrived.

So, she has no advice to give him, but he feels better for talking to her. He knows what she’d say, anyway. She’d never had any patience for… anything. She’d tell him to walk up to Allura and offer a place in his bed whenever it was wanted.

Sometimes, Shiro seriously considers doing just that.

But Allura is still so careful never to touch him. She avoids being alone around him. She does not even look him in the eye, unless she has no other choice. She won’t say his name. So he resists the urge to offer what he wants to give her, though it itches at him.

At least the war provides plenty of distractions.

#

Allura learns to deal with the exhaustion and headaches that come with using the White bayard; she doesn’t have a lot of choice. Eating helps, if she can stomach the food, which is why she ends up carrying a bowl of something Hunk calls chili into the common room after yet another battle with the Galra.  
She is surprised to find it already occupied. It is late, and the battle was hard, but Lance is not in his room. Instead, he sits against a couch arm, twirling Mrril’s bracelet around and around his wrist. He looks up when Allura enters and nods at her, gesturing to the space beside him. She almost demurs, but the headache will be worse if she does not eat soon.

So she settles near him and takes a few bites, her attention drawn by the passage of the blue beads through his fingers. She asks, finally, “You care for her?”

Lance shrugs, his fingers faltering for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean. Is that terrible? She was—is—pretty and nice and, and determined, you know? And hopeful, even after all of this. And she was the first girl I… you know.” His ears stain darker. Sometimes she forgets that humans can change color a little too, given the right stimulus. 

“Anyway,” he continues, when she does not mock the admission. “I know I _should_ care for her, right? I should probably love her, shouldn’t I? They took her, probably because of me, right? So maybe I’m the reason she’s not dead, but, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just torturing her, instead? And I’d be the reason for that, too. And I’m just, you know, eating dinner, and doing what I always do, and I just…” He shrugs, and his shoulders just curve over.

Allura stares at him, a half-dozen responses jumbling against one another inside her head. She doesn’t know what to address first, and finally says, “Lance. Anything the Galra do… you aren’t responsible for it.”

He snorts. “Right. Sure.” He scrubs at his face and grimaces, picking at the sofa. “Anyway. Enough about me. How’re you holding up?”

Allura blinks, taken off guard. “I’m fine,” she says, ignoring the creeping tendrils of the headache at the back of her skull. She takes another bite as Lance groans, throwing his arms in the air.

“No, come on!” he says, half a whine. “I told you mine! I bared my soul to you! We’re misery buddies! Tell me how you’re doing!”

She does not know how to tell him that it does not work that way. That is not her role. Her duty is to take care of them, to make sure they are well. Not to burden them with her issues. But she can see that rebuffing him will only hurt him. The admission was hard for him. She wonders if he told anyone else. So she adjust what her reply and measures it carefully. “Things are difficult, but not beyond what I can handle.”

He snorts, slouching further against the cushions. “’Difficult.’ Yeah. I guess they are.” He sighs, then, and starts bouncing one of his legs. “You tell him yet? About…” He flicks his gaze down and hums a tune she does not know.

Allura stiffens. The reminder is unwelcome. Obviously, she made a mistake by even attempting openness. She says, through clenched teeth, “No. It is not his concern.”

Lance laughs, then, short and punchy. “Not his—Allura, it kind of literally… You should tell him.”

“I said no,” she says, clipping the words from between her teeth. Her appetite is gone. Besides, the food did nothing to ease the headache this time. It claws around, trying to fill up every available space inside her skull.

“What’s going on?” _he_ asks, standing in the doorway and looking between them with, tension in the line of his shoulders and mouth. “Everything alright in here?”

“Everything is fine,” Allura says; maybe if she repeats it enough times, it will be true.

“Yeah,” Lance says, standing and wiping at his face again, self-conscious suddenly. “Yeah, we were just, you know, chatting.” He nods at her as he passes, and mouths ‘tell him.’

For a moment, they are left alone in the room, something Allura has worked so hard to avoid. She can feel _him_ looking at her, and shivers. “Well,” she says, clearing her throat. “I’ll just be—”

“Princess,” he says, quietly, and something about his tone calls to her. She jerks her head up in surprise, looking at his face. He looks different when he’s awake. At least she has gotten used to the lack of scars. He rubs at the back of his neck. “You know I’m here if you want to… talk. Or. Anything.”

She blinks, trying to make the words make sense. She says, finally, weakly. “Of course.” 

“Right,” he says and steps to the side, giving her a wide berth to the door.

She ducks her head down and walks past, breathing easier once she is in the hall. It is almost a relief when Coran comms to announce that they have an incoming message from the Blade.

#

Shiro follows Allura up to the bridge; at least she no longer seems about to crawl out of her skin if he walks at her back. There’s something uncomfortable about seeing Kolivan’s face, now. The suspicion that the Blade betrayed the Fist hangs heavy and unspoken in the air, even as Kolivan greets them and says, something tense in his voice, “I believe we have found Lotor. I’m transmitting the coordinates for the base where we think he is hiding.”

Allura goes perilously still across the table, as coordinates and schematics unfold around them. Shiro watches her, through images of the base. It is on the borders of Galra controlled territory. Relatively small. The design is unfamiliar to him.

“And why do we think Lotor is there?” Keith asks, frowning over Pidge’s shoulder at Kolivan. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“We’ve had reports of his ship coming and going,” Kolivan says, his gaze narrowed. They are not usually so cool with him, and they have avoided communication since the Fist massacre. It is still fresh and the possibility of betrayal hangs between them. Allura said that Huirice may have had more information about the massacre, but she has not awoken yet and everything she knows sleeps with her. “And one of our sources tells us that he spent a large portion of his exile in this location.”

“Great. So it’s probably well defended,” Lance says. He’s grown quieter, over the last few weeks. Mrril’s necklace still hangs around his wrist. He fiddles with it, instead of pacing. He is twisting it, now, spinning it around and around, the beads clicking against one another.

“We believe so,” Kolivan says, cocking his head to the side. “But you have faced greater challenges. And we are prepared to offer you aid, if you tell us when you—”

“No,” Pidge says, too quick. “No, that’s okay. We’re good. On the help front.”

Kolivan blinks at her. He asks, “Is something amiss, Paladins?”

“Everything is fine, thank you for your concern,” Allura says, before the conversation can veer further off-course. “We will take your information into consideration, and, as always, we appreciate your efforts.”

Kolivan looks taken off of his guard, but the dismissal is as obvious as it is polite. He bows his head and says, “Very well. Until we speak again.”

For a moment, after his transmission disconnects, none of them speak. And then Hunk says, “So, there’s like, a 68% chance this is a trap, right?”

Pidge snorts. “You’re only giving it 68%?”

“Well, I mean…” Hunk shrugs. “Yeah, you’re probably right. So. Trap? We’re all thinking trap, aren’t we?”

“It could be true,” Lance says, frowning at Mrril’s necklace. “And even if it isn’t… it’s something, right? It’s what we’ve been looking for. Even if Lotor just wants us there, so what? I say we go and kick his quiznak, one way or the other.”

Shiro is inclined to agree. But. He gets the kind of threat Lotor is, now. He says, “If it is a trap, he might not even be there. The people we’re looking for might not be there.”

“So we’ll take out his lieutenants instead, or whoever he’s got waiting there for us,” Keith says, nothing if not predictable when it comes to a potential fight. “We’re all ready now. We’re strong. We’ve got the White Lion.”

Shiro grimaces, thinking about the red in Allura’s eye. The problem is that they aren’t wrong. This is the best lead they’ve gotten about Lotor. And the longer their people are missing, the worse he feels. Something needs done. He says, “True enough. Princess?”

Allura takes a deep breath, looking up and drawing the attention of the group. Her silence thus far had weighed on Shiro. She says, staring at the image of the base, “Pidge, can you check the Blade’s work? See if you can find out where they got their intel?” It is a tacit admission that they are going ahead, and it lightens the atmosphere of the bridge immediately.

“On it,” Pidge says, hurrying to her station.

“The rest of you, see what you can find out about the station and get ready, just in case. We can discuss this once we know more.”

#

Knowing more does not make things easier, really. They confirm that Lotor _does_ come and go from the base. As near as they can tell, he is there currently. The knowledge makes Allura want to take the Castle there immediately, but she is not so irresponsible as that. Avenging the dead means nothing if you endanger the living to accomplish it.

The defenses around the station are not what they have come to expect from Galra outposts, but that makes sense. Lotor was banished. He would, by necessity, have to adapt. That does not make whatever he devised less dangerous.

There is no way to tell if their captured allies are on the station; some form of shielding blocks their scans. And they have no way to tell if it is a trap. Even if it is, it looks like one that must be sprung, they all eventually agree, after a grim, quiet argument.

“Alright,” _he_ says, finally, one of the last hold-outs to the idea of storming the base. He frowns at the schematics. “So, we have no idea if Matt and the others are on the station, but we have to go forward assuming they are. That means we can’t attack it with the Lions.”

Pidge nods. “I agree. Someone will need to get aboard and look for them. I’ve already designed a tool that should get us through an airlock. I can—”

“I will go,” Allura interrupts, staring at the flashing information that details when Lotor last arrived on the station.

“What?” Coran snaps his head towards her, frowning. “Are we sure that’s a good idea? Lotor would be—”

Allura cuts him off before he can continue and share information that the others should not have. She says, “I am the most qualified to infiltrate the base. I will be able to read any logs we find that might contain the location of our lost people. And if they are injured, I stand the best chance of being able to carry them out quickly.”

Coran shakes his head, and _he_ says, “I’m going, too.”

Allura jerks her head around to look at him, momentarily too surprised to speak. She finds him already watching her. She does not want his help. Not at all. He should be kept far away from Lotor. As far away from Lotor as possible. Before she can figure out how to articulate that, he continues, “You can’t go alone. And, if nothing else, my presence might throw them off. I mean, as far as they know, I’m dead, right?”

Keith says, “Unless the Blade told them about you.”

_He_ shrugs. He is still holding her gaze. It is the longest they have looked at one another since he returned. “Yeah, fair enough. But I’m also the only one with experience breaking out of Galra captivity. I understand how they set things up. He might have been exiled, but he still learned from them.”

Hunk, fidgeting in the sudden tension, says, “We could all—”

“No,” _he_ says, shaking his head. There is familiar determination in his eyes, a look that says he will not be moved. A shiver runs down Allura’s spine. “Two people can sneak aboard. But all of us would be obvious. They’ll know exactly what we’re doing.”

“What about Black?” Keith asks. “They’re going to be suspicious if she isn’t out there, fighting.”

_He_ glances away, finally. He says, frowning, “I’ll see what I can do about Black.”

#

Shiro’s pulse is humming uncomfortably fast when the others hurry from the bridge, off to prepare for a battle they’ve almost certainly been set up to lose. Only Allura remains behind, needed on the bridge. They pull her in too many directions, all the time, and he knows it. But he doesn’t know what to do about it.

She adjusts the information displayed about Lotor’s base and says, quietly, “You should fight with the others. Lead them. They need you.”

Shiro watches her work, the surety in each movement and the tension in her shoulders that gives away how much weight she’s bearing. Maybe the others do need him. But they’re not the only ones. And the idea of her going to Lotor’s base, alone, makes him want to break something. Preferably, Lotor’s face. He says, “Princess, I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

She blinks over at him, something like surprise on her features. She nods, and says, “Alright.”

“Don’t leave without me,” he tells her, and turns, finally, to go visit Black.

#

Shiro stands in front of Black, as the others climb into their Lions. No one wanted to wait to attack. No one wanted to leave their captured in enemy hands longer than necessary. He doesn’t blame them. He looks up at Black and says, “I can’t pilot you right now, but I need you out there. They need to see you.”

She watches him with her glowing eyes. He can feel a distant sense of dread from her; she understands the plan and does not like it at all. Last time he went into a station involved in one of Lotor’s plans without her, he did not come back. He grimaces. “I know. But that isn’t going to happen this time.”

She does not believe him, and he rests a hand on her paw. “I promise. We’ll get through this. And if it works out, Lotor will be dead by the end of the day.”

If nothing else, she likes that. He smiles, a little, though perhaps the banked rage she’s still carrying around should worry him. She purrs, the rumble vibrating up through his arm, and he says, “And you can come pick me up, when we’re done. Sound good?”

She accepts the plan, though her lack of thrilled support presses against his thoughts, even as Allura opens the wormhole and takes them through. “Good luck,” he says, stepping back when they reach the other side. The Lions crouch and leap out into battle. Black hesitates only a moment, looking down at him, before she flies from the hanger.

He knows she won’t really take part in the battle. But she’s out there. And that’s enough. White stares after the other Lions for a moment and then turns his gigantic head to stare down at Shiro. “Hey,” he says, “I’m looking after her, okay?”

White’s eyes dim slightly, a wink or disapproval, and Shiro shakes his head. He turns aside and goes to find Allura. He worries that if he’s even a moment late, she’ll leave without him.

#

Allura waits by the space-jump, pacing in an attempt to handle the restless energy making a home in her bones. The air inside her helmet feels stuffy. Her bayard is heavy at her hip. She imagines she can feel Lotor, sense his presence, and it curdles her gut. Her knuckles itch. 

“Hey,” _he_ says, stepping into the room. She should have left without him. She almost had. But she’d worried he’d try to follow on his own and put himself in danger. That worry kept her rooted in place. “You ready?”

She jerks out a nod and motions him towards his tube. “Hold on tight,” she advises him, vaguely sure that the first time she tried a jump she thought she was going to die. “And follow me.”

“Understood,” he says, shifting his weight back and forth in front of the tube, flexing his fingers in and out. He says, as she grabs the sides, preparing to jump, “Princess…”

She glances over at him, not quite meeting his gaze. “What?”

For a moment, his mouth opens and closes and then he grimaces. “Nothing,” he says, “Nothing, it’s not important right now.”

She nods, relief mingling with strange disappointment in her stomach. “Let’s go,” she says. And she jumps.

#

Falling through space, holding onto a tiny sled, is not one of Shiro’s favorite things to do. There is so much _nothing_ around him, surrounding him, pressing in from all sides. Ships and Lions dart through the blackness, monstrously huge from this perspective. Flashes of light disturb the blackness, here and there, distracting, blinding.

Allura cuts through the black of space like a knife, her body held straight as an arrow, and he follows her as best he can. It seems impossible that they will not be noticed, but, then again, they are miniscule compared to everything else going on. Two specks in the vastness of space. It would take so little to be pushed off course, to shoot off into the nothing and never be found.

Cold creeps through Shiro’s suit. There is so much of it. How could it not? He grinds his teeth against it, and they land with a whisper of sound on the side of the base. They walk across the surface, their boots keeping them attached to the walls until they reach an airlock. Shiro slaps the small device Pidge gave him onto the controls and it whirls, flashing brilliant colors before playing a triumphant little tune.

The airlock slides open. They step inside and it slips shut, atmosphere refilling the space as Pidge’s program runs to completion.

And just like that, they’re in.

Allura takes a shaky breath beside him, and draws up her shoulders. Her expression goes flat, and he shivers when she prowls out of the room.

It is the last thing that goes right.

#

The halls are empty. That is, perhaps, understandable. Most of Lotor’s people should be out in space, fighting the Lions. But the emptiness is eerie. The quiet creeps across Shiro’s skin and speeds up his breath. They find no computer terminals. No sign of prisoners. They have nothing to report when the others ask for updates. The sound of battle filters through Shiro’s helmet. Things seem to be going alright, outside. At least, no one is screaming.

The station itself is cool and fashioned in purples and grays and reds. It contained more color than most Galra ships, but none of it was exactly welcoming. The halls were brightly lit, somehow worse than a dim light would have been. It completely ruins the illusion that they are sneaking anywhere, despite the empty spaces.

The back of Shiro’s neck prickles, as they approach a door near the middle of one hall. It doesn’t appear any different than any of the other halls they’ve crept down, but he’s learned not to ignore his instincts. He almost grabs Allura’s elbow, whispering, “Princess….”

“I feel it,” she says, barely loud enough for him to hear. She does not look over her shoulder, but she does hesitate for a moment. “You could go back. Follow the Y behind us and—”

“No,” he says. “We’re staying together.”

She turns her face to the side, further away from him. He wonders what her expression is doing that she so badly does not want him to see, but this isn’t the time to figure it out. She starts forward again, slower than before and it does not matter at all.

The room is full of soldiers.

And Lotor is standing in front of them, leaning on a sword that is half as tall as he is and that is sparking with some form of crackling energy.

#

“Princess Allura!” Lotor says, smiling with all evidence of joy. He stands before her, flanked by his paltry guard. He looks smaller in person. In her head, he had grown to gigantic stature. He had taken the form of a monster. Reality shows him to be just a man. Tall. Altean in feature, with Galra eyes. He looks young, except in those terrible, yellow eyes. “I’m delighted to see you. Dare I hope that you are here in response to my offer?”

Allura cuts a look at _him_ to see if he responds to Lotor’s mention of an offer, but he does not so much as twitch. He is glaring at Lotor, sunk into a defensive posture, his bayard in hand. Allura draws up taller and spits across the space between them. “Where are our friends?” she demands, in answer.

In her helmet, Hunk demands information, but his voice is distant and faint. Allura can’t focus on it. The world has narrowed down. 

Lotor tsks. He wipes at his face and looks at his fingers with languid consideration. He shifts his grip on the strange, electrified sword. “Uncouth. Oh, don’t worry,” he says, as though his opinion weighs on her mind in any way, “I find it charming. What was it you asked about? Your friends. They’re not here.”

Allura snarls at him. Beside her, _he_ asks, “Where are they?”

Lotor ignores him. He does not take his eyes off of Allura, and she hates the way his gaze feels on her skin; measuring, proprietary. He says, “Around. And safe. And they can stay that way. _You_ can ensure they stay that way, Princess. Along with the rest of the universe. All you have to do is reconsider.”

Disgust roils through Allura like a coiled snake. Enough of this. He is only half-Altean. And he did not bring enough guards. Not to stop her. She will beat the information out of him before she listens to another of his indecent requests. She tells him, so that he is prepared for it, “I am going to kill you.”

Lotor sighs, boredom flashing across his face. “A shame. I suppose this one is related to your reticence?” He glances to the side, arching one eyebrow and pursing his mouth in an unimpressed moue. “Are you the original, then? I did anticipate that you’d show up to complicate matters, eventually. Well.”

He shifts then, lifting the tip of his blade off of the floor and gesturing to the guards with his chin. He meets Allura’s gaze again and winks, “Let’s see how you feel once he is no longer here to… divide your affections.”

#

There is not enough space to fight in the hall. Lotor’s guards charge forward, while Lotor himself stands at the edges, waiting to strike. Allura slams one guard into the wall, punches another, crunches her elbow into the nose of a third. Beside her, _he_ flows from one attack to the next, each movement smooth and designed to put down opponents.

It does not matter. The guards come in suffocating waves. There are more of them than Allura first realized. They swamp forward, slowly forcing Allura back, while in her ears the other Paladins yell demands for answers, distracting her until she shuts the comm down.

She only realizes what is happening when it is too late, when Lotor moves in lightening quick to grab _him_. Lotor drags _him_ back, through the doorway. He calls, “Keep her busy, but I want her unharmed.”

Allura screams, “No!” without thought or plan.

Lotor grins at her, wide and terrible and feral. “Don’t worry, darling,” he says. “This will only take a moment.”

And the door slides shut behind him with a terrible click.

#

Everything is going wrong. Again.

Shiro pivots to face Lotor, taking in this new space. There is a _throne_ at one end, huge and garish; it is faintly lit from some interior source and built too large. The rest of the room is empty. There is a muffled thump against the door. It gives, just slightly, bowing inward. “Don’t worry,” Lotor says, standing between Shiro and the door, his blade flashing in his hand. The smile has fallen off of his face. “She cannot get through. I have built this place to withstand even the legendary strength of the royal family of Altea.”

The door bends a little further. Shiro can see the imprint of Allura’s knuckles. He does not like the potential reasons that Lotor would build a base Allura couldn’t punch her way out of. He really, truly hates this man. But he also knows Allura. So he says, licking his lips, “I think you’re going to be surprised.”

Lotor rolls his eyes and tosses his hair over his shoulder. “Oh, I doubt it. Nothing has surprised me in a very long time. You certainly do not.” And then, as quick as a breath, he moves forward, the energized sword humming through the air. Shiro grits his teeth and feels a wild kind of relief as they clash.

Since he came back everyone has been telling him about Lotor. This man killed the other Shiro. This man wants to force Allura into some kind of twisted marriage. Shiro badly wants to kill him. He wants to tell the others it will be alright, but he can’t spare the time for it.

Lotor parries each of Shiro’s attacks with an almost bored look on his face, moving in the split second before Shiro even strikes. And Lotor’s blows land easily. He moves around blocks that _should_ work, like he knows where they’ll be, like he’s reading Shiro’s thoughts.

And all the time, Allura pounds on the door, the blows intercut with moments of silence when she must be fighting her way free of Lotor’s goons. Keith says, “We should go down there, something is obviously wrong.”

Shiro orders, “Keith, no,” because the last thing they need is more targets, and Lotor lands a stunning blow across his jaw. Shiro stumbles back a step, going to one knee, barely bringing his arm up in time to protect his neck. Lotor smirks, unblemished. He is holding one of his arms behind his back. His posture is terribly relaxed. He is playing, Shiro realizes, the way a cat back on Earth would play with its wounded prey.

Something cold tickles the back of Shiro’s throat. And there is another grind of tortured metal. The door holds, but Allura must be throwing her entire body against it, giving everything she has, all while Lotor’s soldiers harry her, and— Shiro grits his teeth and pushes away the pain, standing and cracking his neck side to side.

Lotor rolls his eyes. He says, “Every. Time. Well, come on, then. Let’s get this over with.” And he moves in to attack, finally. His strikes are lightning fast and carefully placed; it is like fighting someone who is using a script you were not given enough time to practice. Shiro moves to block and attacks, but he is too slow. Lotor somehow knows everything he intends, driving him back, scoring a half-dozen strikes, until he knocks Shiro down, again.

Shiro pants for breath. Blood runs from a cut along his jaw, hot and stinging. Lotor sighs, his glowing sword singing through the air as he brings it down in a terrible overhand slice and—

And Shiro gets the Galra arm up in time to catch the blade, barely.

And the blade slices _through_ , splitting the palm, the forearm, taking half of it off at the elbow. Shiro gags on a scream. It hurts. He had not thought it would. It isn’t part of him. Not really. It isn’t flesh and blood. He curls, hunching over, his body automatically trying to protect the limb, and Lotor grabs his hair, yanking his head to the side.

Shiro jerks against his hold, uselessly; Lotor is nearly as strong as Allura. And he is reaching, with his other hand, to dig fingers into what remains of the Galra arm. Shiro pants, “No—”

And screams. It drowns out the panicked shouting of the others.

The pain is—the pain is all there is. The whole world. The entire universe. He cannot—he cannot—

Metal screams against metal. Allura’s voice, raised in a scream, comes to his ears, suddenly. She howls, “Shiro! _Shiro_!”

His name. She’s calling his name. Shit. He forgot how much he liked the sound of it on her lips. He blinks, shuddering, slammed back into his body by her voice. He is laying on the floor. The Galra arm is… gone. He cannot tell if he is bleeding out. Lotor stands before him, head cocked to the side, a small, satisfied smile on his mouth. Behind him, Shiro can see Allura’s bayard sticking through the door as she carves her way in. She shouldn’t have used it. It drains her too badly. He needs to end this. Now.

Shiro snarls at Lotor, panting in short, punched out breathes. He rocks to his knees, his bayard clenched in his other hand. He does not think about it. There is too much pain for thought. He knows what he needs and he calls, the fear that it will send him away again a distant, smothered thing, and the bayard glows, and—

And Lotor’s eyes widen with surprise, if only briefly. Shiro flexes fingers that he can _feel_ in a way the Galra limb never provided. The entire arm tingles, faintly electric. He spits, gathering the strength to stand, and Lotor’s smile finally fades away. Lotor stalks forward, the first blow hitting before Shiro fully gains his feet. Shiro blocks it away with his glowing arm, sparks jumping between Lotor’s blade and his forearm.

Lotor yells, the sound all frustration as he lands more strikes, one after another. He was holding back before, Shiro realizes, as he scrambles to keep up. Even with the bayard, Lotor is so fast. He knows everything Shiro is going to do. He knocks Shiro down again. It only takes seconds.

Third times the charm, Shiro thinks, madly, staring up into Lotor’s yellowed eyes.

Lotor’s shoulders are heaving. He looks, at least, undone. He snarls, “I have killed dozens of you.” The words hit as hard as any of his attacks. Shiro’s heart jerks sideways. But he does not get the time to process it. Lotor bats aside his arm, raises his sword, and continues, “And you know… It doesn’t matter how determined you are. Or how strong. Or how brave. Because do you know what I have found? You all die the same way. Just like this.”

Lotor sneers over him, glowing sword poised for the killing blow. There is nothing like compassion in his yellowed eyes. Shiro gasps, looking for the strength to fight off another blow, even as Lotor stabs forward, lightning fast—unstoppable.

Allura screams his name. Shiro has beat to realize that she will have to watch two of him die, and he wishes she did not, and—

And there is an expanse of black and pink and soft gray in front of Shiro, between his heart and Lotor’s blade. Allura’s scream cuts off abruptly, her entire body jerking as terrible, white electricity jumps across her, shaking her like a toddler would a doll. The tip of Lotor’s glowing sword protrudes from the space beside her spine, right below her rib cage, right in front of Shiro’s eyes. Red runs down her armor, forming a terrible river.

Over her shoulder, Shiro sees Lotor’s expression, blown apart with something akin to horror. Lotor says, “Princess?” like he is puzzled by her sudden appearance on the end of his sword. He jerks the weapon out, and Allura gurgles. The electricity dissipates. Her knees give. Blood _gushes_ out of the injury in her back, no longer held back by the blade.

Shiro cries out, wordlessly, jerking to grab her, though a dozen injuries protest. He barely feels the pain. 

Allura is dead weight in his arms. Her head falls back and her eyes are open wide; her mouth trembles. Her hands flutter like wounded birds, skittering across his shoulders, his arms, never quite managing to grab. They leave bloody marks behind. Her palms are sliced open. The wound in her chest is terrible, blood rushes out like water from a busted dam.

“No,” Shiro says, dumbly, pulling her closer, his mind nothing but a white-hot buzz. “No. No, Allura.” He presses a hand over the wound, feeling the hot wet of her blood seeping into his glove. 

“Ah,” she gasps. She looks almost confused. Puzzled. There are flecks of red on her lips. Blood in her lungs. No. No.

Shiro _can’t think_. He says, “Help. Help me,” and he doesn’t know who he’s talking to. The world in general, perhaps. He looks up, away from Allura’s shattered expression, and finds Lotor staring at them, mouth open, eyes wide. He’s still holding the sword. It is visibly dented with the shape of fingers. She grabbed it, Shiro realizes. Held it. Stopped it from going all the way through to skewer him as well. 

Lotor stumbles back a step. “You,” Shiro says, the blinding white around his vision staining to red, to black. His blood burns like fire in his veins.

The word seems to bring Lotor back to himself. He shakes his head, narrowing his eyes. He snarls, mad anger in his tone, “Look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined everything!” And he brings his sword up again.

Shiro cradles Allura closer, the futile instinct to protect her too strong to resist. He throws up the bayard arm, in a last, pitiful attempt to ward off the blow, and—

And the impact is like a bomb going off. Lotor’s sword hits the side of his wrist and for a moment the world stops. There is a flash of blinding light, and then a boom of deafening sound. An unseen force pushes Shiro down and back. 

He shakes his head, stunned and stupid, aware of little but the weight of Allura against his chest. He blinks desperately, aware that he has perhaps seconds until Lotor attacks again, and his vision clears enough to reveal that Lotor is… across the room, struggling to stand by the far wall, blood pouring from his nose.

Lotor snarls, shoving back his hair and beginning a terrible march forward.

And the wall behind him disappears, torn away in a tremendous rip of sound. The White Lion’s jaws appear for a moment, before the black of space replaces them. Lotor flies back, sucked out as the room abruptly depressurizes. Shiro grunts, slamming his glowing hand down into the floor, his fingers digging into metal like it is butter. He holds on. To the station. To Allura.

And White returns, sticking his head into the hole, plugging it. His mouth is open, beckoning.

Allura’s fingers bump against Shiro’s jaw, clumsy, sticky with her blood. She fumbles at his cheek, his ear, the back of his head, tugging at him weakly. The touch draws his focus. 

Allura stares up blankly. She mouths something. His name. There’s no sound behind the movement. “Sh,” Shiro tells her, anyway. “Sh, you have to—sh.” He groans, forcing his damaged legs to stand. “It’s going to be alright.”

Shiro sways, body running on automatic, ignoring injuries that will come back to collect their price later. He cradles Allura, her head tilted back, limp. Her eyes are sightless. The blood is not pouring out of her wound any longer. Shiro is aware enough to know that’s a very bad sign.

He runs for the Lion, babbling nonsense words, ignoring the others as they yell demands to know what is going on.

At some point, her eyes close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am over [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/andtheblueberrymuffin) for screaming at, just fyi.


	6. Chapter 6

White does not wait for Shiro to climb into the pilot’s seat. He is moving as soon as Shiro carries Allura aboard, streaking in a straight line across the field of battle. Shiro adjusts his hold on Allura; his bayard is pulsing with waves of discomfort that’s bordering on pain and he does not know _why_. Maybe it isn’t working properly. Maybe it’s preparing to send him across the universe again. 

He shoves that thought away. They need to get to the Castle. They need to get to the infirmary. They aren’t going fast enough.

“Shiro! Allura! Anybody!” Keith yells, his voice ringing in Shiro’s ears. “What is going on? The fleet is breaking up, what’s—”

“Allura’s hurt,” Shiro finally manages to say. His voice comes from far away. He can feel Black pushing against his thoughts. He can feel her presence. She’s flanking White, clearing a path to the Castle. His bayard _aches_. The palm feels like its burning. He can see it glowing steadily brighter and he _does not know why_.

“Hurt how?” Hunk asks.

Shiro opens his mouth and shuts it again. She isn’t moving. He doesn’t—she might not be breathing. He doesn’t want to say that, any of that. He doesn’t want to make it real.

White lands in a hurried rush, and Shiro is moving immediately. He trips and keeps going, momentum holding him upright as he rushes through the hangar. “Coran!” he yells, “Allura needs you in the infirmary!”

#

Shiro beats Coran to the infirmary. He does not know how. He has no memory of running there, afterwards. His lungs burn. He can’t get enough air. He doesn’t care. Allura’s hair has pulled out of her bun and tangled loose around his arm. The glow of the bayard shines through the strands, a stupid thing to be distracted by. The ache is all the way up to his elbow. He yells, “Coran!”

“I’m here,” Coran shouts back, sliding into the room. “Now what—oh my gods!”

Shiro half-expects that Coran will freeze, but he does not. Instead, he jumps into a higher gear, even as the color drains out of his face. “Put her there!” he orders, pointing at one of the infirmary beds. Shiro obeys, lowering Allura down gently. She sinks against the mattress, loose-limbed. Her head flops to the side. He stares down at her, his ribs so tight around his lungs he can barely breathe. The bayard is becoming impossible to ignore, even with the situation.

Scans pop to life around the bed. They are all screaming. Shiro can’t read them, exactly, but he’s had enough experience with Altean tech to understand that her heart is not beating. She is not breathing. She is—

Coran yanks at her armor, throwing pieces to the side without a care as Shiro clenches the fingers of the bayard, trying to get it to stop. He needs to help Allura, more than anything. He can’t deal with whatever the bayard is doing. Because Allura isn’t moving. Not at all. She isn’t breathing. He feels useless. How did this happen? Why would she do this? Shiro pleads, “Coran,” because this can’t—this can’t actually be happening. This is a bad dream. A nightmare. He will wake up, and she will be fine.

“I know!” Coran shouts, pulling a knife from somewhere and running it down the center of her under-shirt, parting the fabric over the wound. There’s too much blood to see the injury; there are dark red smears across her skin, obscuring what Shiro realizes, distantly, are other pink markings.

Coran does not bother to wipe at the blood. He slaps some kind of bandage over the injury, one that pulses light and dark and then, eerily, seeps down into the wound. “Get away from her,” Coran orders, pulling off his gloves and dropping them.

Shiro shakes his head. “What, no—”

“Her heart stopped!” Coran yells, and there are tears running down the man’s face, free and unchecked. “I have to restart it before we can put her in the pod! Now get away from her! I won’t ask you again!”

Shiro scrambles back, bumping hard into another bed, grabbing onto it for support. Coran ignores him, rubs his hands together briskly—sparks jump between them—and then slams his palms down onto Allura’s chest.

Her back bows up off of the table in a terrible arch. Her arms jerk. After a second, Coran lifts his hands away and she collapses back, still. Unmoving. “Come on, come on,” Coran mutters, rubbing his hands again. This time, Shiro sees the blue sparks that jump from his skin to Allura’s chest, and Coran cries out with relief as the screens behind her stop making one of the terrible sounds filling up the air.

The burning from his bayard fades, inexplicably.

“There,” Coran says, jerking back, “now we just have to pray that her heart can keep pumping until I get some blood and—”

He cuts off when her pulse flatters, again. Shiro jerks forward, the burning in the bayard redoubling, his nerves screaming at him. He does not understand _why_ , but he feels the same draw to Allura that he feels when piloting Black, the need to activate it somehow. It is too much to ignore.

And he will do anything, anything to see her heartrate as anything but a flat line. 

He presses his glowing hand over her ribs, and the burning _stops_ ; the relief threatens to take out his knees. It nearly distracts from the way his fingers sink into her chest, but only nearly. The image is terrible and horrifying, but—but he can feel the beat of electricity in his fingers, jumping from his bayard into her heart. The line of her pulse steadies again and then strengthens, as a glow spreads out from his wrist into her surrounding skin.

For a moment he gapes at it, but there _isn’t time_ to absorb it. He feels strange, like someone hooked his navel from the inside and is pulling the core of him out through his arm. The screens around Allura are going crazy; he can’t tell if it’s good or bad. Coran yells, “What are you doing?” 

“I don’t know!” Shiro shouts back. His voice echoes oddly. “It’s the bayard! Should I stop?”

“No!” Coran sounds, at least, very sure about that. “Don’t you dare!”

And that has to be good enough. Shiro has other things to focus on, anyway. “Breathing,” Shiro says, looking jerkily away from the brightly glowing place where his wrist sinks into her skin, “she’s not—”

“Take care of it!” Coran orders, already across the infirmary, digging through supplies with the desperation of a dying man.

Shiro stares down at Allura, her expression slack, her eyes closed, and bends with a cry. He does not think when he tilts her jaw up, or when he squeezes her nose shut. He just does it. He fits his mouth over hers and blows air into her starving lungs.

Coran stumbles back over, yanking his jacket off of his arms. “What are you…?” Shiro asks, gasping for breath, floating on mad adrenaline and panic. He can feel Black, she’s so present in his head that he keeps expecting to see her out of the corner of his eyes. He does not sense her thoughts, because they are his, in perfect harmony.

The light pouring out of the bayard grows brighter. It seeps into Allura; the pink markings on her face and the others that he can see across her chest all swell with it.

“Do you see any other Alteans around?” Coran demands, the words barely registering, before he shoves a needle into his arm without a moment of hesitation. “Do you know what human blood would do to her? Well, neither do I! So!” And he grabs the other end of the strangely glowing tube he’s holding, shakes it until it fills with blood, and then slides another needle into Allura’s arm.

Shiro catches only glimpses of this, busy breathing for Allura. He grows lightheaded. More lightheaded. He feels like he should pass out, but Black is there, lending him the strength he needs. He whispers, trembling, “Please, please,” and does not know who he is begging, or for what, exactly. Please breathe. Please let her be alright. Please let this be a nightmare. Please. Please.

He closes his mouth over hers, and she jerks, weakly, wheezing against his mouth. She does not cough, but her lungs do draw in air, weakly, on their own. He can feel it, around his fingers. Shiro sags, laughing with punch-drunk relief. He curls his other arm around her head, and presses his forehead to hers, dizzy, weak. Her skin is cold. Dry. Except around his hand.

The inside of her ribs feels wet and hot and—

He grimaces and asks, “Can I—”

“No,” Coran says, “nope, not yet. Keep doing what you’re doing, please.”

Shiro nods, his thoughts going bleary and slow. He lets his eyes close, at least. He keeps his fingers curled around her heart, holding it as carefully as he has ever cradled anything in his life. The blaring alarms around him slowly fall quiet, one after another, returning silence to the infirmary.

He feels numb, distant, when Coran says, “Alright, actually, maybe you’d better stop that.”

Shiro cracks an eye to look at him. He asks, “Why?” The word seems to come from far away. 

Coran’s eyes are wide, white all the way around. He says, “Because I think you’ve done enough. I have the pod ready. Just… let me have her, and—”

“No,” Shiro says, tightening his hold and barely restraining a snarl. No one is taking her away from him. Not right now. 

“Alright,” Coran says, taking a step back. “Alright, that’s fine. Bring her here, then. Quickly.”

Shiro nods and then says, “I’ll have to…take this out.” He can’t lift her and hold her heart at the same time.

“That’s alright,” Coran says. “You don’t… need to do that anymore. You can stop.” 

Fair enough. Shiro pulls his hand from her chest, looking despite all better sense. He expects the bayard to be bloody, but it seems unchanged. It does not leave a giant hole behind. There is nothing at all to show he had his hand inside her, nothing but a faint, glowing mark the shape and size of Lotor’s blade. 

Shiro expects the alarms to all scream again, but they do not. He scoops her off of the table and carries her in the pod, expecting, at any moment, for Coran to yell that they have made a mistake, that they went too quickly or not quickly enough. But he settles her, and the glass simply slides shut over her lax face.

And that is that. The ache in the bayard is gone. It feels like nothing more than an arm again.

Shiro stares at her through the glass. His eyes reflect oddly, glowing golden until he blinks and shakes his head. There are splatters of blood on her neck and face. She looks dead, not simply injured, and he shudders, pressing his hand and forehead against the glass. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, and startles when there is a thump from behind him.

Shiro spins, the bayard shifting in form, becoming something long and bladed as he squares off in front of the pod. He does not find enemies flooding into the infirmary. There is only Coran, who apparently backed across the room and ran into the wall. He slides down as Shiro watches, his hands visibly shaking. “Coran?” 

Coran blinks towards him, but his eyes do not quite focus. It could be related to whatever he did to Allura, with his hands. Shiro is never going to figure out how the Alteans work. Shiro asks, concerned, “You okay?”

“King Alfor died of a similar wound,” Coran says, his voice quiet, flat. It is not what Shiro expected. “I could not save him. If you had not been here… If you hadn’t done—” Coran shudders, turning his head to the side. The tear tracks on his face catch the light.

“I…” Shiro starts, because this is his fault. If he had been faster, or stronger, or smarter, they wouldn’t be there. Allura wouldn’t have ended up skewered through the chest if not for him. He never gets a chance to articulate any of that. He’s not sure he would have been able to, anyway.

Keith burst through the door, yelling, “Hey, we need to get—holy shit! Shiro!” His eyes go wide and the color drains from his face. For the first time, Shiro realizes that his armor is covered in blood.

He says, “I’m fine.” Keith lets out a choppy laugh, and Shiro adds, “Most of it isn’t mine.”

Some of it is. A fair proportion. But that feels far away and unimportant. Someone else had their arm ripped off. Someone else got the shit beat out of them. He can’t feel any of it, really. Adrenaline, or whatever the bayard did, keeps him humming along, outside of his body.

Keith’s color gets worse, and his gaze slides to the side, over to the healing pod. He asks, raw, “Allura?”

“She’s alive,” Coran says, pulling up to his feet and rubbing his face clean.

Keith grimaces. “Good. But we need to get out of here, how are we—do we have enough of her energy to make a wormhole?”

Coran jerks a nod and says, “I’ll take care of it.” He rushes from the room, and Shiro blinks at Keith. He feels… strange. He’s beginning to think it’s a good thing that he’s in the infirmary.

“So, you’re okay?” Keith asks, giving him a look that Shiro cannot read. 

“Well, I’ve been better,” Shiro tells him, leaning against Allura’s pod. Maybe if he just… rests for a minute the world will snap back into focus. He blinks down at his faintly glowing arm. He can see tendons in the back of his hand. He has fingernails.

“Yeah,” Keith says, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Look. Uh, I need you to come with me. To the hangar.”

Shiro shakes his head. “Not right now,” he says. Whatever it is can wait. He just wants to lean here. Just for a while. Maybe if he’s still for a few minutes, the world will catch up with him.

Keith flexes his fingers in and out and grimaces. “Yes,” he says, “right now.”

Something about his tone manages to snag Shiro’s drifting thoughts. Keith’s skin is ashen. His eyes are too wide. A muscle in his jaw is jumping. “Alright,” Shiro says, shifting away from Allura’s pod and grimacing as his full weight comes down on his legs. “Sure.”

#

Shiro barely remembers the walk to the hangar. Keith doesn’t say a word the entire trip, but he glances over his shoulder a dozen times, like he thinks Shiro might disappear in the middle of the hall. They wormhole away during their walk, and Shiro finally gathers enough brain cells together to ask, “What’s so important?” just as they reach the doors.

Keith cuts him another tense look. “Come and see,” he says, and leads Shiro through the door.

The others are all gathered around Black, bayards in hand, helmets still on. They look ready to jump out of their skin, something Shiro notes as the world snaps back into focus with all the pleasure of a bone being set. There is another figure in the hanger. One that yanks Shiro back into his head, into his aching body, into the anger and terror warring for dominance in his chest.

Lotor is flat on his back on the hangar floor. His face looks space-burned, the top layers of skin flaking up and off. Black holds him down with one gigantic paw. He is shoving at one of her claws, an exercise in utter futility if ever Shiro saw one.

“What happened?” Keith demands, too loud, gesturing at Lotor.

“He woke up,” Lance says, his gun trained on Lotor’s head. “And tried to run. Black caught him.”

Shiro walks forward. He stands over Lotor, who goes still when Shiro’s shadow falls across his face. Shiro asks, slow and careful, “What is he doing here?”

“I, uh, I saw him,” Hunk says, holding his bayard and staring at Shiro’s expression as though hypnotized. “Floating in space. He was trying to get to a ship, I think? Anyway. He was just… there. So I grabbed him. And I just brought him here. And then Keith said we needed to go and now here we are.”

Shiro crouches, cocking his head to the side. This man put a sword through Allura. Electrocuted her. Shiro hated him before that. Now… Lotor watches him, his mouth pressed shut as he takes fast, shallow breathes through his nose. Finally, Lotor hisses, “You’re going to regret this.”

Shiro considers that and shakes his head. “You know,” he says, “I don’t think so.” He grabs Lotor’s hair and draws back a fist. The bayard adjusts its weight as he throws the punch, getting heavier around the knuckles. The sound it makes against the side of Lotor’s head is intensely satisfying.

Lotor goes limp, all at once. Shiro releases his hair, and his head thumps to the floor. Shiro stands, turning to face the others. They are staring at him, holding themselves terribly still. “That’s a whole lot of blood,” Lance says, after a beat.

“Allura’s,” Shiro says, because he has had this conversation already and he never wants to have it ever again.

Their faces go paler. Lance finds his voice first, “Is she…?”

“She’s alive.” And that is, Shiro can admit to himself, the only reason Lotor is. They need information from him. He’s taken their friends and family. But if Allura had died in his arms for good—

She didn’t. That’s the important part. He clings to that, in the suddenly sharp-edged world. His body hurts in dozens of places. And now that the world has come back into focus, he is aware of the throbbing agony under the bayard and the smell of burning electronics. “Take care of him,” he tells Keith, before focusing on Pidge. “I think,” he says, “I’m going to take you up on your offer to help with the Galra arm. What’s left of it, I mean.”

#

They offer to knock him out for the surgery. Hunk says, “You really, really should, man. It’s. It’s a lot.” He already looks green and they haven’t even started. Shiro declines. He does not want to be unconscious. Not with Lotor on the Castle. Not with Allura helpless in one of the healing pods. Not with the memory of her eyes going empty so present. Besides, he has dealt with worse than whatever they’re going to do.

He washes up first, because Pidge recoils at the idea of taking off whatever is left of the arm in his current state. Allura’s blood slides down his skin, curls around his toes, disappears down the drain. Cleaning off the blood makes the wounds he sustained more obvious. Lotor sliced open his jaw and left a cross-crossing pattern of gouges and ugly cuts across the rest of his body.

But they aren’t life-threatening. Lotor was just _playing_. Shiro forces his hands to relax and blinks down at the new red crescents gouged into his flesh palm. Keith clears his throat from the doorway and says, “I brought medical stuff.”

“Thanks.” Shiro shakes his head. The world feels too sharp, but he’s beginning to drift again, borne away by exhaustion and pain. “I’m going to need more than that.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Hunk says, looking around Keith’s shoulder. “Yeah. We should get you in one of those pod things.”

“No.” People aren’t aware of anything in the pods. The world goes on around them. He can’t—he can’t stomach the thought of that, right now.

“Shiro…” Keith says, his mouth pulled down in the corners.

“No,” Shiro repeats, and so they treat the injuries the old-fashioned way, which, with Altean tech, is still more impressive than anything that could be managed on Earth. And afterwards, when his wounds are closed but achy, they direct him to one of the infirmary beds, where Pidge has a tray of tools that are all curved hooks and sharp metal.

“I can still—you can sleep through this,” she says, nudging at her glasses. “Last time, he… I mean. You can. If you want.”

Shiro climbs onto the table and leans back, turning his head to the side, away from the arm. He can see Allura’s pod, like this. He concentrates on the bayard, long enough to get it to deactivate. The loss of it is profoundly unpleasant. He says, “Just do it.”

#

It is as bad as they made it sound. It is not so much the pain—that is muted by some kind of Altean gel that numbs his nerves. It just feels wrong. Things crunch and he feels it in his organs. Sometimes they tug and his bones all jerk. There are wet, organic sounds. He grits his teeth together, catching involuntary noises in his throat, and pushes his remaining fist against his thigh, knuckles digging into muscle, until at last they finish.

“There,” Pidge says, wiping her hands. They are shaking now, though they felt nothing but steady during the procedure. “What do you think?” she asks, and then grimaces.

Shiro glances down at the place where his limb ends. It is smoothed. The flesh is reddened, but Altean medical tech is so advanced that it is near magic. There is no scar. It is almost like his arm never existed. Bile burns in his mouth and he swallows it down, where it finds reinforcements for another assault. “Looks good,” he says, his mouth full of bitterness.

He does not even have to call the bayard. Maybe his need is great enough that it just responds. A second later, the glowing arm shimmers back into place. It is incredibly, eerily detailed. There are faint hairs of light on his forearm, the flicker of a phantom pulse in his wrist.

“How does it feel?” Hunk asks, helping Pidge collect up pieces of dark metal and circuitry, all of it wet, some of it unfamiliar. They must have pulled it from inside of him. He grinds his teeth against a shudder.

“Different,” he says, flexing faintly glowing fingers, briefly feeling the flutter of Allura’s heart, and—

And he jerks to his feet, grabbing a basin they used to hold some of the Galra tech, and allowing his stomach to empty, finally.

“Gross,” Hunk says, quietly, before blurting, “Oh God, sorry.”

Shiro huffs a dry laugh, spitting into the basin. “You’re fine,” he says. “Go on, get out of here. I’ll take care of the rest.” That, if nothing else, gives him an excuse to stay in the infirmary, not that he would have left without one.

#

Shiro straightens up the mess from the surgery; there is something darkly satisfying about destroying the remnants of what the Galra put into him. And then he makes his way over to Allura’s pod. A pillow sits near it, on top of some blankets he is sure were not there earlier. The Castle’s mice are really far too intelligent, but he can’t fault them too much. He pulls a blanket around his shoulders and sits, hissing when healing injuries pull, leaning back against the pod.

He does not really mean to sleep, but it happens anyway.

He dreams of Allura, standing in the infirmary, staring down at the sword driven through her chest. When he blinks, the sword is gone, and it is his arm, instead, buried to the elbow. Her fingers dig into his bicep, squeezing desperately, trying to push him back. Her expression is twisted with horror. He feels something hot and wet, beating in his hand. 

In the terrible way of dreams, he can see his hand, then, sticking out of her back. Something dark and wet pulses in his hand. Thick veins run out of it and they feed, not into her flesh, but down into his wrist, each beat pushing glowing blood into him. He—

He jerks awake on the edge of a scream, his heart jerking in his chest. He struggles to draw a breath around his vicious ribs and the invisible hand squeezing his throat, tearing the blanket away, his stomach one big cramp, and—

“Sorry,” Coran mumbles, somewhere close by, “sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Shiro fights for a breath and then another. He feels on fire under his skin. He can’t get enough air. He wishes Coran were not here. He swallows and swallows again, and manages to say, “You’re fine.” His voice sounds like he exchanged his tongue for gravel. 

Coran does not seem to notice. He sighs and bumps into something in the dark, making Shiro jump. His heart makes an effort to lurch out through the spaces between his ribs. Shiro covers his mouth, feeling a terrible sound in his throat, and Black touches him, drawing away some of the overwhelming emotion attempting to swallow him.

It lets him take a breath. And then another. He shivers, skin breaking out in gooseflesh as trembles race along his bones. Black pushes at him, easing them enough for him to notice Coran stumbling another step forward before finally, blessedly, stopping to lean against one of the infirmary beds. “You okay?” Shiro asks. 

“No!” Coran whispers and laughs, a little, wetly. “Have you ever drank 10,000 year old Ortegiglian brandy?”

Shiro blinks. At least this conversation is carrying him steadily further away from the image of his arm shoved through Allura’s body. At least there’s that. He says, “No.”

“Well, then my advice to you is: Don’t!” Coran says, before sliding down to the floor.

Shiro snorts. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Talking about nothing is slowing his heartrate further. His ribs stop biting against his lungs. He hangs his head down between his knees and enjoys a few breathes. The sweat he broke out in starts drying across his skin, cool and uncomfortable.

Coran shifts across from him and says, “I thought we’d lost her.”

Just like that, Shiro’s heart spasms again. He says, biting the inside of his cheek, “We didn’t.”

“I know. Thank the gods.” Someday, Shiro needs to ask about the Altean gods that Coran invokes. He doesn’t feel up to it at the moment. “Do you know,” Coran continues, after a moment. “I think it would have made you King, though.”

Shiro’s mind takes a moment to sort that sentence out. He lifts his head slowly and asks, “What?”

He can just make out Coran nodding in the dim light. It must be near the middle of the night. “Well, she is the Queen, technically, whether she uses the title or not. Alfor is dead. That’s how a monarchy works, you know. On Altea,” Coran says, like it makes any sense at all. 

Shiro wonders just how much of that 10,000-year-old brandy Coran drank. He repeats, “What?”

“I’m getting there,” Coran says, waving a hand in a slow spiraling pattern. “Anyway. Allura. Queen. And she gave him—the other one of you—a royal burial. Burial her father should have had, if we’d had his body. Crown and everything.”

Shiro hates it when they talk about the other Shiro’s death and funeral. It feels like someone walking over his grave. It is not improving this conversation. He says, “I’m not him.”

“No, I know. That was off-topic. Apologies.” Coran falls quiet for a moment; Shiro hopes that he’ll fall asleep. But after a moment he sighs, instead, and continues, “The child would be next in line, of course. But if she’d died, well, it certainly wouldn’t have made it, you know.” He shrugs, the movement dimly seen as a bomb of freezing cold detonates in the middle of Shiro’s chest. Coran seems unaware of it, clearing his throat and plowing onward. “So there’d have been you. And I figure, you’ve the same genetic make-up. That’d make you King, wouldn’t it? We’ve had people take the throne with less of a claim. Not that the succession matters, really. There’s only me left to rule.”

Shiro fumbles a hand out to the side, looking for something to grab onto. The world seems to have shifted sideways, all of a sudden. He can hear his pulse in his ears. He asks, his voice shaking, “What child?”

“Allura’s child.” Coran says. His tone adds _of course_.

Shiro is standing. He does not remember how he got to his feet. His head is buzzing. His hands ache. He asks, his voice an echo in his ears, “Allura was pregnant?” Allura was pregnant, with the child of—of another him, and she jumped in front of a sword. To save him. He shoves the thought away in an act of cowardly self-preservation, flicking on his comm and demanding, “Where’s Lotor?”

Hunk answers him. “Um. We found some holding cells, on the sixth level? Pidge managed to set up shielding.” He keeps going, but Shiro barely hears the sound of his voice. Coran calls after him, but he is already out of the room. The sixth floor is too far away, but it feels like he arrives in front of the cells in a heartbeat.

Hunk is waiting outside of one, his bayard resting against his shoulder. He flashes Shiro a nervous smile and smoothers a yawn to say, “Hey, Shiro, what’s up, man?”

Shiro stands in front of the door. His palms burn. His eyes sting. Allura was pregnant. He says, “Open this.”

“Um,” Hunk says, shifting his bayard and punching something into the control panel by the door. It slides open. Inside the cell, Lotor is sitting on a bench. His hands are bound in front of him by some kind of glowing shackle. A bruise has blossomed in dark purple against his cheek. Shiro should have had Black crush him. 

Lotor cocks his head to the side, taking in Shiro’s expression. The smirk he was wearing withers on his face at whatever he finds. He jerks to his feet, bringing his hands up as best he can. “Is something up?” Hunk asks, as Shiro stalks forward. “What’s going o—oh my God!”

Shiro slams Lotor against the wall. His first punch connects with Lotor’s jaw. Behind him, Hunk yells, “Guys! Someone! I need some help! Shiro! Stop, man!”

Lotor must think better of trying to look condescending and above it all. He makes to pull away, and Shiro slams the bayard, heavier than a fist, into his sternum. Lotor bends forward, the breath going out of him, right into Shiro’s knee. Lotor makes a wet sound and slides sideways. Shiro lets him fall to the ground.

From somewhere far away, Shiro can hear Keith demanding, “Hunk? What’s going on?” Shiro paces in a circle around Lotor, watching him try to push up with his arms. Shiro kicks them out, and Hunk makes an effort to grab him. Shiro shakes him off.

“I think he’s going to kill Lotor!” Hunk says, his voice tight with panic. “Someone—is anyone—”

“We’re on our way,” Pidge says. Shiro ignores them all. Lotor kicks out at him, and Shiro stomps his knee. There’s something new in Lotor’s eyes when he looks up. Shiro doesn’t really care about that, either. He shoves Lotor over onto his back and drops. Lotor thrashes when Shiro curls fingers around his neck, cries out when the next punch lands, and the next, and the next.

“Pidge, don’t!” Keith yells, from somewhere. The world is so narrow. Allura was pregnant. 

“Let _go_ , Keith, he won’t hurt me.” Pidge. Pidge’s voice. Shiro ignores her, too. He draws his fist back, again, and Pidge is there, suddenly. She throws herself over Lotor’s face, and Shiro freezes. His arm trembles. He’s breathing so hard it’s shaking his entire body.

He says, in a voice that does not sound like his own, “Move.”

Pidge shakes her head. She’s wearing her civilian clothes. She looks up and her face is pale. “I don’t think I should do that right now. He knows where Matt is, Shiro. Okay? He knows where Matt and the others are and you can’t—you can’t punch him to death when he’s our best chance of finding them. You can’t. You know that, come on.”

Shiro stares at her. He almost doesn’t care. It almost doesn’t matter. And then he remembers himself and jerks back, stumbling a step backwards as he finds his feet. Lance steps into the space he leaves, in normal clothes but holding his bayard. Shiro keeps walking until he finds the door. He pulls himself out and presses his hands to the wall, bending over, breathing between his elbows.

“Is he alive?” Lance asks, from the room.

“Seems to be,” Pidge says.

Keith clears his throat. He’s standing near the door, one hand extended towards Shiro’s back and not quite connecting. He asks, bracing as he speaks, “Is Allura—did she die?”

Shiro spits bitterness down to the ground. He says, “No.”

He can see Keith sag out of his peripheral vision, pressing a hand to the wall and sucking in a breath. “She’s not? I thought, when— Then, why?”

Shiro squeezes his eyes closed. His fists hurt, but not badly enough. He says, “She was pregnant.”

There is a pause. Keith’s voice is icy cold when he speaks again, “ _Was_? Coran told you she wasn’t anymore?”

Shiro’s eyes burn behind the lids. His throat feels like he swallowed glass. It is so hard to remember that Lotor knows where the others are. He has to be kept alive. At least until they find their friends. “No. But Lotor stabbed her. She _died_. She was dead. Coran brought her back.” She died for him. Lost her last connection to the man she loved. His fault. This is his fault.

There is a moment of silence. Shiro assumes it is for Keith to absorb the horror. But then Keith clears his throat, and says, “That… might not mean as much to an Altean.”

#

Keith takes Shiro back to the infirmary. Shiro resists the urge to give Lotor a parting kick in the head, just for good measure. They find Coran sitting in front of Allura’s pod, his legs folded as he regales her with stories about her parents. Keith pauses in the doorway, his nose wrinkling when he asks, “Are you drunk?”

Coran twists to look at them, his cheeks a rosier pink than normal. He says, “Listen here, number four, I’ve decided that once this war is over I may never be sober again.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Keith says, grinding his knuckles against his forehead. “Fine, whatever. Look. Allura’s—the embryo. Is it still fine?”

Coran blinks at them and says, “It seems to be.”

Shiro grabs the closest thing—one of the beds—and grips hard enough to stay steady. His fingers press into the metal. His heart turns over and for a moment he forgets how exactly he’s supposed to breathe. 

Keith touches his shoulder, and Shiro still needs to process that Keith knew about this, but that’s going to have to wait behind everything else. He doesn’t even know where to start at this point. “I almost told you,” Keith says, quietly. “But. It didn’t. It didn’t seem right.”

“No, that’s…” Shiro waves a hand in a tiny, vague circle. 

“Do you want to sit down?” Keith asks.

“I’m fine.” The lie is easy and automatic. He can feel Keith staring at the side of his head. He can hear Coran, across the room, resuming his tale. 

“Sure,” Keith says. “So, just to be, I mean, I don’t want to ask, but, you’re not going to. That is, Lance was worried that you might….”

“I’m not going to kill Lotor tonight,” Shiro says, because Keith is a good kid. He doesn’t deserve to be tortured by that question any longer. 

Keith nods. He says, “Okay. That’s—okay. Do you, I mean, I was going to go get some sleep. Are you heading to your room?”

“No.” He’s grateful for these easier questions. It’s nice to know the answer to something without having to think about it at all.

Keith is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Right. Well. I can stay, if—”

“Go get some rest,” Shiro says. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He doesn’t want company. The things he wants are too tangled to sort through. 

“Alright,” Keith says, hesitating for another moment before walking out of the room. Shiro braces his other hand on the bed and curls his shoulders down once the door slides shut. He breathes, in and out, the simple process requiring all of his concentration. His sinks down, the floor is cold beneath his knees, and rests his forehead on the back of his flesh wrist.

A child.

There’s going to be a child.

A child his and not.

A shaky gurgle of laughter rises in his throat and he covers his mouth. He needs to deal with this, figure it out, but breathing is hard enough. He’s so tired. And he doesn’t know where to start. With anything. Allura jumped in front of a sword for him. She never told him about the baby. She grabbed the sword while impaled, to keep him safe.

He shakes his head and finds his feet, moving over to the pillow and blanket he abandoned and settling there. He sincerely hopes that anything looks better in the morning.

#

Nothing looks better in the morning. Coran’s snoring snaps Shiro out of a dream of split bone and blood, and for a moment he cannot remember why he is sleeping on the floor. And then it comes back. Shiro’s first impulse of the day is to go find Lotor and beat him to death. He resists that, shoves it down and buries it deep, where it has to stay for the moment.

Coran is asleep sitting up, his head leaning too far to one side. Shiro decides to let him keep going. He looks peaceful enough. Allura does not, really, not even in the pod. It’s hard to look peaceful when covered in blood. There’d been no time to clean her up before throwing her in the pod. “You and I need to talk,” Shiro tells her, tapping the side of the pod and shaking his head. It would help if he figured out what to say before she woke up.

Huirice sleeps a few pods down, most of her wounds healed. Shiro sighs, checking on her and scrubbing at his eyes. “Why don’t you wake up?” Shiro asks her. “I’d be interested in hearing what you’d tell me to do now.” He has a feeling that he knows. Most of Huirice’s advice ran in one vein. He shakes his head and glances over at Allura once more, and then he makes himself leave the infirmary.

There’s a whole day to be faced, whether he likes it or not.

#

Lance stiffens when Shiro walks towards Lotor’s cell. “Guys,” he says, into his comm, “Shiro’s here.”

“Relax,” Shiro says, burying a wince at the worry in Lance’s voice. He must have frightened them. They shouldn’t have to worry that he’s going to lose control like that. They shouldn’t have to stop him. That’s not their responsibility. “I’m just checking in. How is he?”

“Still breathing?” Lance says, flexing his fingers around his bayard. “Like, he’ll be okay, I think? His face isn’t going to be so symmetrical anymore, though. Hunk did his best to set his nose, but….” 

Shiro could not care less about the state of Lotor’s face. He asks, “Has he told you anything?”

Lance’s gaze cuts sideways. His voice is flatter when he says, “Not really. Keith is talking to him again, but… but he just keeps asking for you. And he’s not going to tell us anything useful. I mean. Why would he? So, we were thinking, you know, maybe we could contact his generals, or whatever. Maybe they’d trade—”

“No.” Shiro bites out the word. Lance stares at him, mouth agape. “We’re not letting him go. He’s too dangerous.”

Lance’s mouth snaps shut. He rubs at the back of his neck. Mrril’s necklace shifts on his wrist. He says, “We might not have a choice. Not if we want to get the others back.”

Shiro does not say that he would not trust any deal made with Lotor. He does not say that letting him go would only endanger more people in the future, that it would not ensure the safety of their friends. He just sighs. The day only just started and it feels like it has stretched for years. He says, “I’m going see what he wants from me.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Lance asks, his tone making it clear that he does not.

Shiro shrugs. “I’ve had worse,” he says. “Open it up for me.”

#

Lotor is sitting on his bench, his legs stretched and crossed at the ankle, his arms still bound, his face a mess of bruises and split skin. Keith paces in front of him, his shoulders raised, one hand gripping his bayard tightly. Shiro clears his throat from the doorway, and Keith flinches. Lotor just narrows his eyes and says, “You owe me four teeth.”

_I have killed dozens of you_ , Lotor said. _You all die the same way_. Shiro shivers, ignoring it. “I don’t owe you anything,” he says. He does not ask Keith to leave. He’s almost certain Keith would refuse. He walks forward, until Lotor has to tilt his head back to meet his gaze. “You wanted to talk to me. Here I am. Tell me where our friends are.”

“How is she?” Lotor asks, instead of anything useful. Lance was right. His nose is never going to be the same again. Shiro curls his fingers against the urge to rearrange it further. “The princess? You don’t seem so crazy around the eyes today, so I assume her condition has improved.”

Shiro shakes his head. He says, “This isn’t a conversation. Where are our friends?”

“Oh, come now,” Lotor says, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes when Shiro does not flinch back. “Be reasonable.”

Shiro stares down at him. Allura died in his arms. Because of this man. His jaw throbs in warning. Shiro takes a breath and says, “Tell me what I want to know and maybe I’ll return the favor.”

Lotor makes a sound that could be a cough or a laugh. He leans back. “You know,” he says, “I don’t know what she sees in you. Leader of Voltron,” he says, mockery etched in every syllable. “You’re nothing but a boy, afraid of losing your things. _That_ is the defining characteristic of the Black Paladin.”

Shiro growls, “You don’t know me.”

“Please.” Lotor tries to look lofty. The state of his face prevents it. “I know every inch of you. Every mental impulse that passes through your unevolved brain. I know how angry you are right now. I know how much control it’s taking for you to be in here, using your words. I know you don’t have much to spare. Did they tell you that the clone fed me information about _everything_ that happened to it on the Castle? I know how much her pulse spiked the first time it kissed her. I know how easy—”

Shiro’s fingers curl around Lotor’s neck. He lifts and shoves, Lotor’s back hitting the wall with a slam. Shiro glares into his eyes and snarls, “Too bad you don’t know when to shut up.”

“Shiro.” Keith stands at his side, eyes darting from his face to his hand around Lotor’s throat. “Why don’t you—”

“He’s not going to tell us anything,” Shiro says. He can feel Lotor’s pulse against his palm. “He’s just going to toy with us.”

“You don’t know that,” Keith says.

Shiro cocks his head to the side, really looking at Lotor, past the injuries and the attempt at a smirk. He says, “Yeah, I do.” And then he blinks, and releases his grip, and steps back. Lotor groans when he drops. “But he might still be useful,” Shiro says, before turning.

“You’re nothing but a brute,” Lotor pants, his voice raw and full of hatred. “A dumb beast. You’re nothing, and I’m going to make her see that, I’m going to—”

The door slides shut behind Shiro. He takes a breath, poisonous words echoing in his ears.

“Hey,” Lance says, shifting in place. “You okay?”

Shiro looks at him, and he winces. “Guys!” Pidge yells over the comm, sparing Shiro from having to blatantly lie. “Guys, I need to talk to everyone on the bridge, right now!”

#

“Okay,” Pidge says, moments later when they have all joined her save for Lance, who stays to guard Lotor. “So, I’ve been monitoring Lotor for transmissions because, I mean, the last thing we need is for him to have an emergency beacon or something, right?”

“Good thinking,” Shiro says, proud of her and ashamed that he completely failed to even consider that. Still, that’s why they’re a team. When one of them falls apart, the others are there to take the weight. It just shouldn’t be him doing the falling apart.

“Thanks,” Pidge says, flashing him a brief smile. “Anyway, it wasn’t _hard_ to find the main subcutaneous transmitter he had, or, like, the two extras. They’re all taken care of, by the way, Hunk figured out a way to scatter the signals to make it seem like he’s actually over here.” She points at a distant part of the map floating around them. “So we shouldn’t need to make any emergency escapes that we cannot make right now anyway. By the way, do we have any word on when Allura will be, you know, out of the thing?”

Coran shrugs. “No clue. She’s doing well, though, and improving rapidly.”

“Alright. Well. We can’t really act on the rest of this until she’s on her feet.”

Shiro frowns, squinting at the data scrolling through the air around them. “The rest of what?” he asks.

“The rest of what we found with his transponder,” Hunk says, pulling out from beneath the console, where he’d been working on something beyond Shiro’s understanding. “See, we caught a signal trying to ping off of his location beacon and we managed to triangulate it based on this logarithm Pidge wrote back when we were looking for the White Lion. That was great work, by the way,” he says.

“Couldn’t have done it without you,” Pidge says, “Anyway, there are at least two people looking for him. One of them is here.” She brings up a system not terribly far from their current location, beyond the borders of Galra space. “The other is here.” The location is near the center of the area the Galra control. Close to where they charged in to rescue Allura, so long ago.

Shiro stares at the flashing screens. “So, some of his people are looking for him, along with… Haggar? Zarkon?” No one talks about the fact that their desperate attack on Zarkon, the attack that cost him months, didn’t even accomplish what it set out to do.

“That’s what we figure,” Hunk says, frowning. 

Shiro nods. “I want you to see if there’s anything else you can do to scatter the signal. We _cannot_ afford anyone finding us right now, understood?”

“Got it,” Pidge says, bending down to the code and sucking her bottom lip into her mouth.

The rest will wait. It has to. They can’t attack either of the identified locations without Allura to open a wormhole. For now, they all get the chance to breathe. And Lotor can sit in his cell and rot, all of his leverage dissolved by the swirling numbers that Pidge and Hunk ground down.

Shiro almost goes back to the cell, to relieve Lance. His knuckles itch at the thought. But Allura will be awake, sooner or later. And he’s had enough time to realize that maybe he should wait for her to mete out such punishment as she sees fit. She has more right to Lotor’s head than he does.

#

Shiro finds himself back in the infirmary, eventually. It pulls on him like gravity, and there’s not enough on the Castle to keep him distracted. His body hurts too much to spar. He walks through the door, intending to check on Allura and Huirice, and freezes. 

Huirice’s pod is open.

She is standing in front of Allura’s pod, still wearing her filthy, battered clothes from the Fist massacre. She looks smaller than she did before the injury, but that might just be the way her ears are laying against her head. Her recovery is the first good thing Shiro’s had to latch onto for so long.

He feels the smile break across his face, chuffing out a laugh. “Huirice!” he calls, moving towards her. Her shoulders stiffen, and he hopes she’s not going to fuss about seeming weak, but he wouldn’t be surprised. “You’re awake, how are you—”

He has nearly crossed the room when she turns and lunges at him. Her lips are pulled back from her teeth in a snarl when she reaches him. He jerks to the side, barely managing to avoid one of her clawed hands. He blurts, “What? Huirice, what’s—”

“Traitor,” she growls at him, spinning to follow him. “How dare you?” She stalks towards him, and Shiro holds his hands out to the side. No one ever mentioned any kind of adverse effect to the pods, but he doesn’t know what else could be going on.

He says, “Huirice, stop, it’s me, it’s Shiro.”

“I know who you are,” she snaps, trying to bull-rush him again. He dodges away, and she spins with terrible quickness, nearly catching his jaw with an elbow. “Did you think I’d forget?”

“Stop,” he repeats, “Huirice, I don’t—”

“Shut up!” she roars, and she charges again. She catches his side, and he cries out, scrambling back as she barrels forward, off her balance, crashing into the line of healing pods. Something cracks. She shakes her head, and Shiro almost considers bolting for the door—he doesn’t want to fight her—but she’s in here with Allura, and he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her.

“Please, listen to me,” he tries again, keeping a medical table between them. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“You lie like you breathe,” she growls and leaps over the table. He pushes her back with his bayard, hissing in pain when she whips around, dragging claws across his bicep. “You should have killed me while I was asleep.”

“Please, come on, Huirice.” He blocks one blow and another. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He couldn’t stomach hurting her, not after everything else. But she keeps pushing harder. He’s never seen her like this, not even the times they saw combat together. He won’t be able to defend forever.

She does not answer, just roars and throws one punch after another. He does his best to withstand the onslaught, but he’s already hurt. And he’s trying so hard not to hurt her. And it is, perhaps, inevitable that she knocks him to the ground. 

She follows him down, her arm drawn back even as he brings an arm up to protect his head.

And then she makes a surprised sound. And her weight disappears off of him. Shiro blinks, disoriented, as she’s thrown to the floor so hard it shakes, her arm twisted up behind her back. Allura kneels over her, one knee pressed into the middle of Huirice’s back.

Her hair is a wild mess, tangled and darkened with blood. Her under-shirt hangs open, stiffened with dried blood. The silver scar in the center of her chest glows, just a little, enough to draw the eye. She is breathing hard. She looks at Shiro, her eyes wild and her cheeks flushed. He says, dumbstruck, his entire world upended, “Allura.”

“What,” she pants, holding Huirice to the ground as easily as anything, even as he notices that she is shaking all over, “the quiznak is going on here?”


	7. Chapter 7

Allura does not understand what’s happening. The world seems to have gone mad. She half-thinks she is dreaming. The last thing she remembers, really remembers, is horrific pain and Shiro’s face, the look in his eyes when she realized she was going to die.

She does not appear to be dead.

She woke to screams and cracked glass. The world did not make sense then. It does not make sense now. She does not know how she got into the infirmary. She does not know how she is _breathing_. All she knows, truly, is that she should be dead, but is not, and that Huirice is going to kill Shiro. She won’t allow that.

Allura weaves across the room. Her legs do not want to work the way they should, but she makes it. Huirice draws her arm back, prepared to deliver a stunning blow as rage swims through Allura’s blurry thoughts. Allura grabs her without thought or understanding, really. She saved Shiro from Lotor. She will not stand by and watch some other strike him. No one will harm him again.

It is a simple thing to pin Huirice to the ground. Huirice thrashes against her, but Allura’s strength out-matches her, even with the dizziness roaming around her head. She is… not completely well. It is not how she normally feels after using the pods. She must have been released too early. She looks up, panting and shivery, and demands of the world in general, “What the quiznak is going on here?”

Shiro stares at her, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He is alive. Somehow, they both made it off of Lotor’s station. He seems unharmed, but his Galra arm is gone—she cannot recall the state of it in the last moment she remembers clearly. There had not been time to care about his arm. All that had mattered was protecting him, ensuring Lotor’s blow did not strike true.

She must have succeeded.

“Princess,” Huirice says, struggling beneath her implacable hold. “Princess, let me up! He’s here to kill you!”

“What?” Allura blinks down at the back of Huirice’s head. 

“ _He’s_ the traitor,” Huirice snarls, thrashing. “I tried to tell you—he—he came to us. He told us you were overwhelmed in battle. He begged us for help, and then they came in. They came in.” The last words hang in the air, her voice hollow and raw.

“No,” Shiro says, “no, Huirice, I wouldn’t—”

“You did!” Huirice scratches at the floor, trying to pull out from under Allura. “I _saw_ you, I—”

“No,” Allura says, firm and flat. She knows this, at least. “He was with us. The entire time.”

“He killed Tralrer,” Huirice says, shaking her head back and forth. She is crying, Allura sees, the tears running down her cheeks without any accompanying sound. “He killed her. I saw him do it.”

Shiro goes utterly still, the horror in his expression crystalizing. He says, “No.” And Allura’s thoughts are scattered and disoriented, but there is still an explanation for Huirice’s claims, one obvious and terrible, forming inside her head. 

Lotor cloned Shiro once. Perhaps they should have asked themselves why he would stop there. He could have done it over and over again. He could— Huirice makes to shove away, taking advantage of Allura’s loosened grip, and Allura shoves her back down, hard. “Stop!” Allura snaps, jerked away from the dark twist of her thoughts, “it was not him! It just looked like him. It has—it has happened before.”

Huirice stills, finally. She blinks her shining eyes and asks, “What?”

#

“Clones,” Huirice says, after Allura explains in short, chopped up sentences that the Galra have stolen Shiro’s body and used it for their own ends, to spy on his friends, to betray them. Huirice is standing across the room, her arms crossed tight. Allura waits near her, poised to grab her again. “Cloning is forbidden.”

“Do you think the Galra care?” Allura asks. She is holding onto a table for support. Every time she shifts, the light reflects off the scar in the middle of her chest, snagging Shiro’s attention back from the dark pit he feels on the edge of falling into. One of his clones, a person with his face, led the massacre of the Fist. He can’t—it can’t—he is going to be ill. “They cloned him. We know that without a doubt. One of the clones was sent to us, and we did not…. One was sent to us.”

Huirice looks across at Allura, her eyes narrowing. “I haven’t seen it,” she says, suspiciously.

“No,” Allura says, her expression shutting the door to that line of questioning.

Huirice ignores the lines of Allura’s mouth and the chilliness in her eyes. “You said you lost someone,” she says.

Allura just stares back at her, until Huirice nods. “Clones,” she says, sagging all at once, rubbing at her face. “ _Clones_. You’re sure that’s the real one?” 

“Yes.” Allura nods. “We ran extensive tests. He shows none of the markers of a cloning process. And he was with us, the entire time, Huirice. He found you, in the base.”

Huirice makes a sound, a laugh strangled at the root. She glances at him, and then looks away quickly, like she cannot bear the sight of him. He can’t blame her. His clone convinced the Fist to open their gates. His clone killed Tralrer. He wonders how many of the others died by hands that looked just like his. Bile burns in the back of his throat.

“How many clones are there?” Huirice asks.

Allura shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Dozens,” Shiro says, surprised by the sound of his own voice. His mind is a flurry of tangled thoughts. He wants to scream, so it is strange that his voice comes out so even. “Or there were. Lotor said he—he killed dozens of them.”

“What?” Allura’s voice is nothing but ice. Her eyes go wide. It is the expression she wore after Lotor yanked his sword from her chest. It is—he can’t— “When did he tell you this?”

Shiro does not want to remember. He does not want to think about this. He does not want to _know_ this. He wants to go back to before he did. “On the station,” he says, each word a razor blade in his throat. “Before he….” Allura’s hand drifts up, towards the center of her chest. She curls her fingers before she touches the scar and flinches.

“Why?” Allura asks, thick-voiced. “Why would he kill them?”

Shiro shakes his head. He doesn’t want to understand why Lotor does anything. “You’d have to ask him,” he says. Maybe Shiro should have. But he hadn’t wanted to think about it. Every time he’s in a room with Lotor, beating him to death for everything else he’s done just takes precedence.

“Would that I could,” Allura says, and her eyes go wider as she takes in his expression. She straightens her back, drawing up taller. “He is here?” she asks, cold as winter’s first snow.

Shiro nods.

“Wait,” Huirice says, her voice cracking, “the asshole who did this—he’s here? _Where_?”

Shiro looks at the two of them. He wonders if the others will be able to convince _them_ not to kill Lotor. He does not feel personally inclined to stop them. He says, “I can show you.”

Allura’s nostrils flare. She nods and then hesitates, glancing down her body. She says, picking at her matted hair and the sliced fabric of her shirt. “Perhaps I should change, first,” she says. Shiro is happy to agree. He does not want to have to see the scar anymore, or the place on her skin where his hand sunk into her chest. She sighs, “Is there anything else I should know?”

He grimaces. There is too much, really, but he tries to summarize everything that happened, everything Pidge and Hunk found, while he walks her to the quarters she has apparently taken for her own.

#

Shiro feels adrift, once Allura disappears into the new quarters. He shows Huirice to a spare room, though he doubts they have any clothing that will fit her. She can at least wash the blood out of her fur. She hesitates in the doorway, looking at him. She says, “Clones, huh?”

He nods. “Things have been strange.”

“I bet.” She drags a nail against the doorframe and looks away. She says, “It hurts to look at you.”

Shiro winces and cannot hold it back. It is for the best she is not looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, unable to think of anything better to say. “I would—”

“I know,” she interrupts. “Let me clean up. Then we’ll go talk to the sarker responsible.”

“Alright,” he says, stepping back. She disappears into the room and he pinches the bridge of his nose before reaching for his comm. “Guys,” he says, “I have news.”

#

Allura does not waste time. Lotor is _here_ , in the Castle. She wants nothing more than to find him and separate his head from his body. But. But her mother and teachers would be aghast if she went to complete a state duty in such disarray. Her father would say that leaders must always present themselves as befits their station.

So she washes, dried blood sloughing off of her skin and out of her hair. She aches. The pod did not complete its full cycle of healing, but the remaining injuries are not life-threatening. They will heal on their own, given time. She will… fully recover.

She did not expect to recover at all. The wound she took was mortal, or should have been. She traces her fingers over the seam of scar tissue in the center of her chest, finding the matching exit wound on her back. The scar glows, faintly. A remnant of whatever Coran did to save her, possibly. She shakes the thoughts away. They are irrelevant at the moment.

She shoves at her hair, stepping from the shower. For a moment, she hesitates over the appropriate garb. Her Paladin armor feels right. But she is not going to Lotor as a warrior. She is going to mete out justice for a crime. She pulls on an under-shift, supposing that the choice will depend on which articles of clothing the mice have spirited into the room.

She steps out into the main room and freezes.

There is a man standing near the center of the room. He is tall, with dark hair and a white forelock. He wears unremarkable black clothes and a glove over his right hand. There is a scar across the bridge of his nose. He looks towards her, and she feels something as cold as the fingers of the dead close around her throat.

He is not Shiro, but he has the same face.

Allura knows his face too well, now, to be fooled. She has stared at him too long while he slept, looking for the ways he differed from the man she lost. She looks into the face of the man in her room and sees that his scar is slightly too dark, that his hair is shorter than it currently is, that the bruise he had on his jaw when last she saw him is gone.

But, even beyond those superficial differences, she knows that he is not Shiro. His eyes are flat and hard. Pitiless, even as he looks her up and down.

The fact that Huirice is laying limp by his feet makes it pretty clear, as well. She takes a step back, and he says, “Princess, I’m going to need you to come with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Allura says, dropping into a fighting pose. He is no match for her. Not physically. Huirice’s presence makes things more complicated, but she should be able to protect the woman and subdue him. 

He nods. “I thought you might feel that way,” he says, and draws a Galra blaster from a holster under his arm. He levels it, not at her, but towards the side of Huirice’s head. “My orders are only to bring _you_ alive, so you _will_ come with me,” he says. “Or I will kill her.”

Allura tries to calculate her odds of crossing the distance in time to save Huirice. They are… poor to abysmal. She tries to run through options, and he reaches into the bag over his shoulder, tossing a strange, heavy circlet across to her. “Put that on,” he orders.

Panic curls its wicked fingers around her spine. She says, “Stop, please, you don’t have—no!” His finger tightens on the trigger. The gun whines. She grabs the circlet. It buzzes unpleasantly against her skin. She considers throwing it at him. She could hit him hard enough to knock him down and keep him there. But it wouldn’t be fast enough to stop him from squeezing the trigger.

“Put it on,” he repeats, and she does, fumbling with the mechanisms. It clicks into place around her neck, cold and heavy. The buzzing worsens once it is on. It sets her teeth on edge. And the entire world feels heavier, suddenly. Heavy and fuzzy.

“Please,” she says, again, because maybe there is something of Shiro in him. There must be. “You don’t need to do this.”

He reaches into the bag again and pulls out a set of shackles. He twists his wrist and they springs open. “Come here,” he says, “slowly.”

She inches forward, watching his gun and Huirice. If she rushes him—if she tackles him—she could—

He moves with the smooth speed she has always admired, grabbing her elbow. She yanks back against him, an instinctive response, and he tightens his grip. And she does not budge. She says, “What?” and jerks harder. It has no effect. 

“Stop before you hurt yourself,” he says, and then he clicks the shackles into place around her wrists. She opens her mouth, preparing to scream, and he pushes a gag into her mouth. She thrashes, confused and horrorstruck, and he ignores all of it. He lifts her and throws her across one shoulder, before turning and walking from the room.

She looks at Huirice as they pass, hoping that the Galra woman will show some sign of waking up. But her eyes are shut and her mouth is slack. She does not stir. Allura screams, but the gag muffles the sound.

#

In the end, Shiro meets the others in the common room. He saw how much blood covered Allura and Huirice. It’s going to take them time to get clean.

“How can she be out already?” Pidge asks, circles under her eyes. “She was—I mean. Keith said she’d been—he said she looked really bad.”

Shiro does not want to explain what happened with the bayard. He opens his mouth to suggest some magical form of Altean healing, but Coran beats him to the punch. “I believe we have Shiro to thank for that. And the Black Lion.”

There is silence, for a beat. And then Lance demands, “What? How?”

“That isn’t important right now,” Shiro says, cutting this line of questioning off before he has to think about his wrist inside of her ribs. “Allura is going to want to talk to Lotor.”

Lance snorts. “’Talk,’” he says.

“Wait,” Pidge says, looking up from the tablet she brought with her to the room. “You mean she’s going to want to kill him, too.”

Shiro shrugs. “Yeah. And, to be honest, I’m not sure why we shouldn’t let her. He deserves what he gets. And he hasn’t told us anything. He has no reason to.”

Pidge frowns. Her lips press so thin they go white. She says, finally, “We could make him tell us.”

They all stare at her for a moment. Hunk finds his voice first. It wavers when he asks, “ _Make_ him? Do you mean like… Do you mean torture him? Us? Because I’m not so sure _we_ could do that.”

Pidge opens her mouth and shuts it again. She says, “Maybe we could.” Her eyes cut towards Shiro, and he can see the guilt in her face. He shudders, but he can’t blame her for suggesting it. After what they saw him do, of course they think he’s capable of torture. 

They might be right.

“Look,” Lance says, breaking the tension, “We can always kill him later, right? But we can’t un-kill him once he’s dead. So maybe we should just…not? For a while. Until we see what happens with this base? Allura will understand that, won’t she?” He looks at their faces and slumps, nodding. “Yeah, fair point. Hey. Where _is_ Allura, anyway? It’s been forever.”

The question sends an immediate prickle of dread down the back of Shiro’s neck. He reaches for his comm automatically, asking, “Allura?” 

He gets nothing but static back.

#

The trip through the Castle is a nightmare. Allura thinks it reaches its peak when the man with Shiro’s face fills his voice with friendly warmth and says, “Hey, Keith.”

Allura does not see what happens. But she hears Keith say, “Shiro, what—”

And then there is the retort of the blaster. Allura rages, the actions futile, when the man steps over Keith. Keith is stirring, a little, moving his fingers across the ground. Not dead. He’s not dead. He’s—the man does something to one of the Castle’s doors, and it swings open.

And Lotor’s voice comes out. He says, “About time you got here. What took you so long?”

The man says, “I couldn’t get her. She was severely injured, and they had her some kind of pod. I didn’t know what would happen if I took her out.”

Lotor grunts, closer. Her skin burns. She can feel his repellant presence. Hatred and thwarted fury speed her heart. She breathes raggedly through her nose, growling when fingers slide along her shoulder. She turns her head and glares at Lotor. 

He looks terrible. Purple bruises cover his face, where the skin has not broken and scabbed. His nose is swollen and the spaces under his eyes are black. His bottom lip is split. It is not what she remembers him looking like, when he shoved the blade through her bones. She thinks she recognizes the shape of Shiro’s knuckles in one bruise across his cheek.

He smiles at her, and the perfect line of his teeth no longer exists. He touches her chin, and she jerks her head to the side. “Princess,” he purrs. “You look radiant.” He strokes her cheek. She pushes her bound wrists against the clone’s back, shoving away, and his arm tightens around her waist, holding her in place.

Lotor’s smile curves at the corners; something terrible moves in his eyes.

He turns aside and says, “Give me that blaster.” He fires, and Allura cries out, though she cannot see what he does. Not Keith. Gods, don’t let him have killed Keith. He says, “Follow me. I tire of this place.”

They carry her to the secondary hangar, full of shuttles they rarely use, and a ship that should not be there. She does not see it at first, but the clone waves a hand as they approach and it shimmers into sight. Allura’s thoughts chase around in tight circles. They should have expected this. Lotor has had the Castle’s plans for so long. They should have killed him immediately.

Whoever allowed him to live while she was in that pod was a fool.

They walk into the ship without a care, without any sign that anyone knows she is missing, and she lets out a strangled cry when the doors at the back of the ship close. 

“Get us out of here,” Lotor orders, sinking into one of the two small seats in the back of the ship. He hisses and curls a hand against his ribs, resting the blaster in his lap. The clone bends and deposits Allura in the other chair. She catches his eyes for a moment, expecting more cold blankness even as she pleads wordlessly; he is the only option she has for aid.

And one of Shiro’s clones has turned against Lotor before. It is not unreasonable to assume this one might, given the right motivation.

He blinks rapidly a few times, something in his expression shifting, and Lotor snaps, “I said I’m ready to leave.”

“Sir,” the clone says, shaking his head and stepping back. Allura jerks to her feet as he walks to the front of the ship. She will be damned if she _sits_ and lets them take her away. She can fight with no hands. She may be weakened, but she can still— 

“Sit down,” Lotor orders. He waves a hand, and biting pain washes from Allura’s neck, up into her head, down through her bones. She grits her teeth against it and takes another step. The ship lurches under her feet, the engine whining to life. Lotor’s expression darkens; his cursed smile freezes. He moves his hand, and the pain redoubles. It is so much—too much—she steps and her knee gives, dumping her to the floor as they exit the Castle.

#

Shiro runs for Allura’s room, telling himself that it is probably nothing. She is probably still showering. There was a lot of blood. But he does not believe it. Neither do the others. Lance and Pidge do not protest when he sends them to check on Lotor, because if something has happened to Allura… well. Shiro suspects Lotor will have something to do with it.

Allura’s door is open. It keeps trying to shut, but something blocks it. Shiro’s stomach fills with stone as he approaches. His mind provides dozens of terrible images of what he might find. Somehow none of them manage to match what is waiting for him.

Huirice lays across Allura’s floor, unconscious. Allura is not in the room. Her royal dress is spread across the bed.

“Guys!” Pidge yells, panic in her voice. “Guys! Lotor is gone! He—someone shot Keith!”

“Is he—he’s okay, right?” Hunk demands, peering over Shiro’s shoulder.

“He’s alive,” Lance says, and Shiro lets out a shuddering breath. “But he’s in a bad way. I’m taking him to the infirmary.”

Shiro steps backwards out of the room. This can’t be happening. He can’t lose her. Not again. He should have beaten Lotor to death when he had the chance. “Coran?”

“I just got a notification that there’s been an unauthorized launch out of hangar two,” Coran says. He continues, but Shiro doesn’t hear it. He’s running again, through the halls, ignoring injury and the demands of his lungs. Black is standing, waiting for him, when he sprints into the hangar. White, he notices, is already gone.

Pidge joins him a moment later, sliding down a zip line and landing in a crouch. Shiro says, “Get in Green, we need to hurry.”

She nods, running to Green as Hunk hurries to Yellow. None of them bothered about their uniforms. The seat feels strange against his shirt when he leans back and says, “Coran, tell me you have some idea where they went.”

“I’m sending you coordinates now.”

#

The ship’s floor is hard. Allura’s knee cracks against it, and she falls sideways, her arms bound uselessly in front of her. A hand catches her shoulder, steadying her. The pain stops, the relief almost more shocking that the initial bite of agony. She breathes raggedly, leaning against a touch that is terribly familiar and not, at the same time. The clone says, his voice even, “Our course is set. You said you wanted her unharmed. That we were rescuing her.”

“We are. And you delivered her as asked,” Lotor says. “And she will remain in perfect condition, if she will only listen to me. Remove the gag.”

The clone’s fingers tangle in her hair. She looks up at him, and he blinks again, pulling the gag from between her teeth. His touch is not cruel. His thumb brushes her jaw; his eyes narrow as he touches her skin, something in them darkens.

Lotor says, “Excellent. Now, hold her so I do not need to… ensure her compliance through other means.”

“Help me,” Allura says, surprised by the sound of her voice. The clone tilts his head, just a little. His fingers curl around her elbow. They do not bite against her flesh as he pulls her to her feet. “Please, I—”

“He won’t listen to you,” Lotor says. “And even if he would, there is no need for that. You don’t need to fear me. I want nothing but peace with you. Even after the treatment I received while you were… indisposed.”

Allura hates his voice. His face. His continued ability to draw breath. She glares over at him, tugging against the clone’s grip. “You stabbed me,” Allura says, chilly. The clone’s grip tightens. She lifts her chin and glares down the line of her nose. “Through the chest. Is that your idea of peace?”

“An accident,” Lotor says, waving a lazy hand. “One I regret deeply, I would not have—”

“You massacred the Fist. You kidnapped our friends.” She swallows against the knot in her throat. “You killed the man I loved.”

He sneers. “I did you a favor.”

Allura stares at him, hating him with every cell in her body, and he tightens his jaw, standing with a wince. The blaster is a tempting prospect, held loosely in his hand. “Princess,” he says, “please, be reasonable. You understand the costs of war. There will always be unfortunate casualties in battle. And I am offering you everything you claim to want. A path to peace for the universe! One that needs not result in millions of additional deaths. A bloodless victory!”

Allura shakes her head. A laugh rises, unbidden, in her throat. “How can you speak of a bloodless victory? Have you no concept of the blood you’ve already spilled?”

Lotor’s smile grows brittle. “All in service to the universe’s greater good. Please, consider what I am offering you. It is what your father wanted, you know?” Allura stiffens. That he would _dare_ speak of her father— 

“It’s true. He wished a joining between our peoples. My father was against it, of course.” He rolls his eyes, bitterness flashing in his expression. “He thought another Altean in the royal family would weaken the Galra bloodline too much, but _I_ can see the wisdom in your father’s idea.” He cocks his head to the side, his voice going smooth and syrup thick. “He was wise about many things. Just like you. He would not have thrown away a chance for peace.”

Allura stops breathing for a moment. And then she remembers how to draw in air, to exhale, to go on living. “You are likely right,” she says, grief thickening her voice as Lotor’s expression flashes with victory. “Father was ever an idealist. Perhaps that is why he lost.” She can admit it. Perhaps she must. Learning that her father could be fallible has not been easy, but it has been necessary.

Lotor’s eyes widen, the smile on his face freezing into place when she continues, “But I am not my father. I would die before I consented to marry you, and you are fool to imagine otherwise.” The clone’s grip becomes painful.

Lotor’s expression twists, momentarily, into something ugly. He says, “Then you are willing to consign the universe to further war? And your friends? These children you have fighting for you? Do you not value their lives enough to spare them their inevitable deaths? Your selfishness astounds me.”

The words twist like a knife between her ribs. They are half of the fears that plague her at night given voice. What would she _not_ do to ensure the safety of the others? She thought, once, the answer was nothing. Now, she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, any peace you promise would be poisoned. You know only lies and deceit and using others for your benefit.”

Lotor grinds his jaw. His hand curls into a fist, and she braces for a blow, for another wave of that terrible pain. But he does not hit her. Instead, he looks her up and down, and she wishes, so badly, that she wore anything but this shift. He says, “You _will_ do as I say, one way or another. This is the only way forward. It is the only way to unite the universe and depose my father. You must see that.” He takes a step towards her, and she pushes back, against the clone. 

She knows he is not Shiro. Shiro would not have shot Keith, he would not have threatened a woman’s life. His eyes are not so cold and dead. But the clone is still preferable to Lotor. Far preferable.

Lotor says, “You are beautiful. Please, be reasonable.” He touches her jaw, and she jerks away from the touch, revulsion curling in her gut.

“Don’t touch me!”

He tsks. His fingers tighten on her chin, tilting it up. He stares at her mouth. Her stomach spasms. She thrashes, for what little good it does, and pants out, “No!” The floor is so cold beneath her bare feet. The space inside the ship seems smaller, suddenly. Lotor fills it completely.

He smiles. That is, somehow, the worst part. He smiles, leans down, and—

And the clone pulls her back and to the side, towards the cockpit, so hard that her shoulder flares with pain. He puts his body between her and Lotor. Lotor demands, “What do you think you’re doing?” 

The clone shifts his grip. He has not released her. He says, “You said she was confused. You said she’d be happy to see you.”

“I lied,” Lotor says. “Get out of the way. Make sure we get back to base. I can handle the rest on my own.”

“No! Help me,” Allura pleads, twisting her shackled arms to take the clone’s hand. She is not sure _why_ he would decide to offer her aid in the first place, but he is the only option she has. 

“Enough of this,” Lotor says, stalking towards them, and the clone pushes her completely into the cockpit, closing the door in Lotor’s face. He bangs a fist against it. The metal dents.

“It won’t hold!” Allura says. “Take off this collar. I am stronger than he is!”

The clone grimaces, raising his free hand to the side of his head. He says, “I—”

“Please!” Lotor will have the door off the hinges in moments. She looks up at the clone, her fingers curled around his, and sees something in his eyes shift. His jaw tightens. He reaches towards her neck, holding his palm near the terrible collar. It makes a strange, whirring sound, and clicks. 

The strange buzzing stops immediately, though the collar remains around her neck. At least it is deactivated. The strange weight in her bones dissipates. Allura takes a breath, swaying with relief that is short lived.

Lotor pulls the door off and stands there, panting, his expression mad with fury. He snarls, “You dare defy me? _You_?”

Allura turns, squaring against him. She pulls against the shackles and they snap, so much scrap around her arms. “Me,” she confirms, and, when he raises the blaster, she charges.

#

In the end, they do not even need Coran’s coordinates. The White Lion has already gone, charging across space, and he is easy to track. 

The Castle follows them, steadily losing ground. It is nowhere near as swift as the Lions. “Just herd them back towards me,” Coran orders, as they race out across the stars. Lotor could not have gotten far. He must be close.

Shiro repeats that thought, over and over, to block out the image of Huirice’s collapsed body and to keep from thinking about what Lotor might be planning. He could have attacked them all unawares in the Castle. He successfully shot Keith, after all. But he didn’t come for the rest of them. He took Allura and ran. Black digs out an extra burst of speed, responding to the pound of Shiro’s heart.

And her sensors pick up the ship, just beyond the White Lion.

It is a small craft, built for speed. It is, in fact, likely to outpace them, especially the Yellow Lion. The bayard throbs; Shiro remembers moving from one side of a battlefield to the other, but the memory is not his, it is one of Black’s, filtering down into his conscious mind in a disorienting moment of queasiness.

He swallows against the nausea and reaches for the bayard port, his hand shifting shape fluidly as he does. It is better not to look at it, though he can do nothing to ignore the weirdness of feeling his fingers blending together, until they are not fingers anymore. He grits his teeth, and shoves the bayard in, activating the system.

The world twists in on itself. Space folds around him and spits him out directly in front of the fleeing ship. He probably should have thought more about where he was going to reappear, but it’s too late for that now. The ship crunches against Black, spinning sideways, the pilot attempting to reverse thrusters. 

Black roars and lunges, jaws closing on the ship, not hard enough to break it to pieces. It jerks against her hold. Sensors blare to life, informing Shiro that the ship is charging weapons. Shiro braces for the hit, and explosions detonate all along Black’s side, rocking them back. Black ignores it, and Shiro’s bayard throbs again.

“Alright,” he tells Black, “good idea. Everyone, we’re going back to the Castle!”

“What?” Hunk demands, but Shiro figures it will not need an explanation. They’ll see what he means in a second.

He activates the bayard. The world slips sideways.

#

Lotor’s first shot goes wide, deflected when Allura pushes his arm up. And then she is too close for him to use the blaster. She grabs his wrist and twists until he screams and drops the weapon. He drives a knee into her side, and she snarls, throwing him into the nearest wall. It dents. She needs to remember that they are in a ship.

The cold blackness of space waits outside. She must be mindful of her strength. 

Lotor bounces to the ground, groaning. He recovers quickly, deflecting her next blow. He is strong and fast, but not as strong or as fast as she is. If she were fully recovered, they would not be evenly matched. But she was released too early from the pod, and his injuries are nowhere near as extreme as hers. They trade blows, knocking one another back and forth, each trying to keep the other away from the blaster, and it is the closest to fighting someone who matches her that she can remember since she woke up to find her entire people wiped away.

Everything else slips out of focus. She kicks him against the wall, and is distantly aware that alarms are going off. He punches her in the face, and she snarls, slammed into the ceiling when the ship flips unexpectedly. She drives a knee into his ribs, and the clone yells something from the cockpit. He elbows her in the throat when she reaches for the blaster. She wheezes, and the ship _jerks_.

It feels like someone shoved her through a space already occupied by something else. It is terribly uncomfortable, disorienting, and for a moment afterwards she thinks she will throw up. Before her stomach can decide one way or another, the ship moves again, dropping abruptly and tipping right side up. It throws the blaster right past her hand as she and Lotor fall from ceiling to floor.

He comes down over her and recovers terribly quickly. His hands wrap around her throat, above the collar. She can see the blaster, where it fell under one of the seats. He leans on her windpipe. She can hear weapons fire on the other side of the door. He snarls, “We have reached my people. Your pathetic bid for escape has failed. But there is still time. Accept my offer and I will spare your life.”

Black spots swim across her vision, and she grunts, stretching the bones in her arm until her fingers brush the blaster. She smells burning metal. She can hear yelling, but it fades in and out. She cannot breathe. Light floods in from the back of the shuttle. She grips the blaster, brings it up. His hair brushes her cheek. His eyes fill her vision.

She pulls the trigger.

And for a moment, she thinks it did not work. He does not scream, or fly off. He just goes still. He makes a sound that is almost a sigh. 

Someone screams her name. It rings in her ears, and Lotor falls forward, his weight crushing over her. She wheezes, pushing at him, and then he is gone. Hands grab her, pulling her up off of the ground. Someone takes the blaster from her. She lets them. The touch is familiar. Comforting. Safe.

“Shiro,” she pants, disoriented by the lack of oxygen and his arm around her shoulders. 

He snaps, “All of you, stay where you are.”

And he says, from farther away, “Take your hands off of her.” 

#

Transporting the ship back to the Castle is a dizzying affair, it turns Shiro’s stomach worse than his previous attempts at teleporting. It leaves his pulse beating wildly. Coran shouts with surprise at his abrupt reappearance in the hangar bay, but Shiro ignores him, charging out of Black’s cockpit. The shuttle lays on its side in the hangar bay, deposited ungently by Black. Lance is already shooting at the rear door—he must have ran down from the infirmary. The others have not yet returned.

“Move,” Shiro orders, and he shoves his bayard through the door, carving his way in without thought. He pulls the metal aside, in time to see Lotor kneeling over Allura, his hands wrapped around her throat. His hair falls forward around their faces, screening their expressions. Allura’s heels scramble against the ground. She is not wearing shoes. There are lines of pink on her calves, curling around her ankles.

Shiro jerks forward, and there is a blaster shot, loud and terrible inside the ship.

For a breath, he thinks Lotor shot her. But both of his hands are occupied. And it is Lotor who slumps forward, a curl of smoke rising from the back of his head. He collapses down onto her, crushing her, they need to get him—

And Shiro jerks to a stop, the universe driving a hard fist into his gut. Another man with his face stumbles towards Allura and Lotor, seizing Lotor and tossing his body aside. He grabs Allura, taking the blaster from her hand, pulling her against his chest, curling an arm around her shoulders. 

It is like looking in a mirror, if someone armed his reflection with a gun and deadened his eyes. The man is him, down to the length of his eyelashes. But he is wearing the wrong clothes. He is all in black, even the glove over his right hand. He aims the blaster at them while Allura coughs and gulps desperately at the air, and says his name.

“All of you,” he says, this man with Shiro’s face, “stay back.”

Hot rage snaps at the back of Shiro’s throat. A clone. Another clone. It is—he can’t— He says, “Take your hands off of her,” and steps forward. The bayard can shield him. He will risk the clone taking a shot. Getting to her is worth it.

Allura jerks at the sound of his voice—did she mistake the clone for him?—and looks up at him. She is bruised and battered, wearing a shift that bares her arms and calves. He cannot even consider the swirls of pink across her skin, more worried about the injuries he sees and any that may be hidden.

She asks, “Shiro?”

The clone stands, pulling Allura along, back a step. He says, “I said stay where you are.”

“Stop,” Allura says, and the next time the clone pulls, neither of them move. “Put that down,” she says, “these are—they’re my friends.”

“No,” the clone says, shaking his head, his eyes moving from one target to the next. He does not, Shiro notices, keep moving without Allura. “No, they—they’ve lied to you. Tricked you.”

“What the quiznak is going on,” Lance demands.

“They haven’t,” Allura says, and her voice is soft. “I promise you.”

The clone shakes his head. “They’re terrorists. Prince Lotor—”

“No.” Allura reaches out and touches his wrist. “Put this down. You’ve been… misled.”

He tears his gaze away from them to look at her, but only for a moment. Something in his expression clicks. It’s a look Shiro is familiar with from the other side. He never thought he’d get to see it. It’s enough to tell him that everything is about to go wrong. The clone says, “Maybe. Doesn’t matter. _We’re_ getting out of here.”

Allura frowns. “I’m not going anywhere.” She moves to jerk away, and the clone lets go of her long enough to flick his wrist. Allura cries out, her hands flying up to her throat, the strange band there, and the clone grabs her around the waist.

Shiro moves towards them, jerking to a stop when the clone levels the blaster on his forehead. “Step back,” the clone says. 

Shiro says, “Listen—”

“No!” The clone drags Allura a step forward. “I don’t know who you are, or how you got my face. I don’t know what’s going on. But I’m leaving here, now.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Shiro says, trying not to look at the way the clone’s arm tightens around her waist.

“Try and stop me,” the clone says, and his finger tightens on the trigger. The bayard tingles, and Shiro prepares to raise a shield, to deflect a shot and run forward, to take advantage of the clone’s surprise, to—

His planning is for nothing. There is a shot, loud and unexpected, from over Shiro’s shoulder. It hits the clone in the neck. A second shot follows an instant later, as he drops Allura with a strangled sound of surprise and pain, abruptly cut off.

Shiro stares, the image so bizarre that he almost can’t understand it. Watching someone with his face get shot is strange and terrible. And he does not have time to process it, because Allura screams, agonized in a way that makes Shiro assume she must have been hit. But he sees no blossom of blood across her dress. Not even when she drops. She stares at the clone, her eyes wide and—and, oh. Oh, no.

Shiro steps into her line of sight, kneeling, grabbing the sides of her face as she whines out a terrible sound, too close to the noise she made when Lotor stabbed her.

“Allura,” he calls, when she just stares blindly forward, through his midsection, towards where the clone lies. Her hands hang limp in her lap. He adjusts his grip, her hair tangling around his fingers. He tries to be mindful of the bruises on her face. “Allura, look at me.”

Her gaze rises, slowly. Her pupils are tiny. She is shaking beneath his hands. “Shiro,” she says, and raises one hand. Her fingers brush his cheek, and tears slide down her face. She repeats his name, and suddenly her arms are around his neck, her fingers knotting in the back of his hair, curling into his shirt.

“Sh,” he says, stupidly, unsure what to do with an armful of her. He can feel her tears against his throat. “Sh, sh, it’s—” It isn’t okay. Nothing in their lives is okay. “It’s—sh. Let’s. Come on. You shouldn’t be here.” She does not move. Or speak. But when he stands, she stretches her legs and finds her feet.

Her hands keep holding, for a moment, and then she shivers and draws back. One hand slides over his shoulder, down his arm. She curls her fingers around his wrist. She is not looking at anything. “Alright,” he says, “come on.” 

He leads her out of the broken ship, stepping over Lotor’s limp body, past Lance, who stares at them, and past Huirice, standing behind Lance, her gun still raised. Her expression is terrible and empty. She says, quietly, as Shiro walks by her, “It was him. It was him. The one who betrayed us. It _was_. I know it.”

Shiro can’t think of a single way to reply. He keeps moving.

#

Shiro brings Allura to the infirmary. He doesn’t know where else to take her. She does not protest, not even when he steps over the threshold. Keith jerks off of a bed with a wince, demanding, “What happened? Is she alright?” He has a bandage wrapped around his ribs and the side of his throat.

Shiro tries to convey with his expression that he does not know. It doesn’t seem like it would be helpful for Allura to hear that right now. Then again, maybe he couldn’t make things worse. Coran rushes in, then, babbling, “Princess, are you alright? What happened? Let go of him, come here.”

Allura makes a raw sound and tightens her grip. It does not hurt as much as he’d half-expected. Shiro says, as evenly as he can, “I don’t think that’s a great idea right now.” He does not know how to say that if holding onto him is what she needs, she can go on doing it as long as she wants.

“What’s that on her neck?” Keith asks, ignoring his own injuries.

“I don’t know.” Shiro hates all of this, so much. “Whatever it is, I think it’s hurting her. She dropped when the clone activated it.”

Keith’s eyes darken. “The clone,” he says, his mouth thinning out. “Of _course_. And where is he?”

Shiro shakes his head, and Keith stares at him before looking slowly towards Allura, understanding dawning in his eyes. 

Allura says, her voice completely flat, her head still bent forward. “It’s a suppression device. It restricts my strength, somehow.”

The idea is so revolting that for a moment Shiro cannot think around it. Lotor built a station she could not punch her way out of. He found some device that negated her strength. He wanted her weak and helpless and—and the idea makes Shiro want to kill him all over again. But that is not the hardest part for him to swallow.

A clone of his used it on her. Someone with _his_ face. He grinds his teeth, looking to the side so she does not see his expression, though he does not think she is looking, or even aware of anything outside of whatever nightmare is going on inside her skull.

“Yes, I see that,” Coran says, frowning at what his scans reveal about the device. “Galra tech. Hold on a tick. Ah. There.” The lights ringing the device dim all at once and, a moment later, it clicks and falls away from her throat. Allura makes no effort to catch it, and it clatters to the floor. Shiro stomps on it. It crunches in an extremely satisfying way. Allura does not flinch at the sound. She’s just staring forward. Keith looks at Shiro over her head, a question in the line of his eyebrows.

Shiro shakes his head again, and Keith frowns, before asking, “Is Lotor… where is he?”

“In the hangar,” Pidge reports, walking into the infirmary, flanked by Hunk and Lance. “In a shuttle. Dead.”

Allura shifts, her fingers drift to her throat and drop again. There are livid red marks branded onto her skin. Shiro hates them. She says, each word quiet and flat, “I am not sure why he was still alive.”

The others shift uncomfortably. Pidge says, “Well, he knew where everyone was. You know. Like Matt.”

Allura does not blink. Her expression does not shift, despite the reprimand that Shiro hears in Pidge’s voice. She says, “But Shiro told me you found one of his bases. Surely we will find information there, if not our missing compatriots.”

Pidge frowns. She has her arms crossed tight over her chest. She asks, “But what if we don’t? What if there’s nothing? What if they already abandoned it by the time we get there? What if they wipe it all clean? What if he was our only chance, and you—” She cuts herself off, frowning miserably at the ground.

“He would have killed her, Pidge,” Shiro says, quietly. He can’t feel anything but relieved that Lotor is a cooling corpse. They should have killed him earlier. Shiro should have beaten him to death the first chance he got. It would have prevented this.

“I know,” Pidge says, misery dripping off the words. “Lance told me. I just. I don’t know. I’m sorry.” She takes her glasses off and rubs at her face. “I can’t… do this. Right now. Sorry.” She turns and walks from the room, her shoulders hunched. 

Lance curses under his breath and follows her, mumbling something about being team counselor now.

“Look, um,” Hunk says, twisting his hands together. “Speaking of, you know, dead people in the hangar. What are we going to do with—”

“Excuse me,” Allura says, turning, her bare feet scuffing on the floor, her shift crooked on her shoulders, her face hidden by her hair. “I need to go.” She takes a step and pauses. She is still holding Shiro’s wrist and she stares down at her fingers, like she doesn’t recognize them.

Shiro moves closer, before she can decide that she needs to let go. He says, “We’ll be back,” for no other reason than to fill the air. He has no plans beyond following wherever she needs him to go. He almost lost her. Again. It—it is too new, too close.

Allura says nothing else. She does not release him. She just walks forward, out of the infirmary and down the halls, until they are in front of the room that seems to have inadvertently become theirs. She walks through the door and stops. The dress he thinks of as her princess uniform is spread out on the bed. There is another dress beside it, simple and soft-looking.

Allura shudders, the movement translating into his wrist through her fingers, and releases him. She walks over to the bed and looks down at herself. There is blood splattered across the shift. Some is hers. Some must be from Lotor. Some Shiro saw splatter from the clone’s throat when Huirice shot him the first time. She makes a terrible sound and grabs the sides of the shift, lifting her arms, and he jerks his head to the side as soon as he realizes what she’s doing.

He has already seen more of her skin today than she’s ever wanted him to. And she isn’t thinking clearly.

He hears the shift fall to the floor in a soft rustle of fabric. He listens to her dress, biting the insides of his cheeks, his skin stinging with unexpected heat. “I am so tired,” she says, the admission as flat as everything else she has said.

“You should sleep,” he says, because it is the single appropriate thing that springs to mind.

She makes a noncommittal sound. Her footsteps back across the room are silent. He shivers when she curls her fingers around his wrist. She does not close them all the way. She does not squeeze. The touch is barely there. He cannot see her face, not with her hair hanging in the way. He doesn’t need to.

Her unasked question hangs between them.

He says, “Yes,” and turns towards her. She takes a step towards the bed, and he follows, all the way across the room. She crawls onto the bed and curls onto her side, her fingers a loose band around his wrist, not pulling. Asking. He tells her yes without words, fitting into place against her back. She tugs his bayard-arm forward, so that her head can rest on it. She twists her hair and pulls it over her shoulder. He curls his arm over her ribs and she shifts it, resettling it.

She knows how they should fit together, he realizes, and is arranging him. This is not the first time she’s done this. He grits his jaw against that stab of hurt. They should have gotten to learn this together. They would have, in a perfect world. None of that is of use at the moment.

She shudders, then, and takes a wet breath. She says, “He saved me. From Lotor. But then he turned the suppressor back on. He wasn’t going to listen to me. Why would he do that? Any of that?”

Shiro shakes his head. He thinks that he loved her the first time he saw her. He wonders if that would be true for any clone made of him, even one programmed to work for Lotor. He wonders what he would do if he saw her, with his mind scrambled from whatever Lotor must have done to that clone. It is not hard to imagine. He lies, “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Her whole body shakes when the tears start, quiet and unexpected. “Don’t leave me,” she says, the flatness gone from her voice, replaced with something terrible and broken. “Don’t leave me, please. I couldn't-I can't- _Please_.”

“Sh,” he murmurs, cradling her closer. “I won’t. I won’t, I promise.”

He does not know if she believes him. But she does, at least, eventually fall asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

Allura wakes aching and warm.

Her body hurts in dozens of places, not least her throat and her dully throbbing head. Her ribs are a point of some concern. The pain in them is not improved by the weight over her side. She cracks her eyes open, memory slicing a thousand cuts across her heart. For a moment it is too much for her to move, to think, to breathe.

The arm around her tightens slightly; there is a soft, questioning sound from behind her. It restarts her heart.

She knows the body curled around her, the fingers that follow the curve of her ribs. In the night, with the crushing weight of death pushing down on her, that familiarity had been all that mattered. She needed to be held, the way she remembered being held. Now, her eyes sting, and her throat closes.

“Allura?” Shiro asks, his voice rough with sleep in a way she has not heard since—

She sits up, away from his embrace, her body protesting the suddenness of the movement. She ignores the throbs and stings. Last night feels like it happened to someone else. She wishes that it had. But it was her who invited him into this bed, who laid beside him, who took a comfort she should not have.

The closeness had felt necessary at the time. Touching him was the only thing that slowed the surging panic in her veins, that made her feel like she was not about to fall apart into a thousand pieces. Watching another with his face die, it had been—it had been a pain she had not anticipated or prepared for. It did not matter that his eyes were cold and hard, that he would have stolen her….

Her mind is a foolish thing.

“Hey,” he says, sitting up slowly. She feels him reach towards her, the warmth of his fingers hovering near her shoulder. “Are… how are you?”

She shakes her head, looking at her hands. Her knuckles are bruised. She should have cleaned up before she slept. She should have allowed someone to tend her wounds. She should not have asked for so much from him. She scratches at the dried blood on her knuckles and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no,” he says, shifting closer. He still does not touch her. She understands why. She took advantage of him, drew comfort he had no duty to give her. She is not sure if she is grateful for his sacrifice or not. Maybe it would have been better if he had refused. “Allura, no. That’s, you don’t need to apologize.”

There is blood on her arms, too. Not all of it is hers. She drags her nails across it. “My weakness—”

“Allura.” He swears, softly, and says, “Come on, no, stop.” He touches her, finally, taking her hand, lifting it away from her skin and the new, vivid scratches on the inside of her wrist. She stares at his fingers, strong and gentle. Covered with scars of their own. Familiar. Different. She closes her eyes, shuddering.

She cannot sit here any longer. She cannot bear—there is too much to do. She has wasted enough time in the twisting tangle of her thoughts. But his fingers curl around hers, and she hesitates, anchored despite her best intentions. She asks, “You are alright?”

He makes a sound, a strangled laugh. “I’m fine,” he says. “No one kidnapped me.” She looks away from their hands. Her shift lays at the foot of the bed. She barely remembers removing it. Was he in the room? He must have been. Her face burns with delayed embarrassment. What must he think of her? What does it matter, compared to everything else?

She shoves the thoughts away. The previous night feels like a terrible dream. She asks, just to make sure, “He is dead? Lotor? Truly?”

“You killed him,” Shiro confirms, and she does not hear the displeasure in his voice that she is sure is there somewhere. The humans always seem to want to spare their enemies. He adds, “Thank you.”

She looks up at him, startled. His hair is rumpled from sleep. His eyes are dark and worried. Stubble has grown across his jaw. She asks, “What?”

“He… he took—he made copies of me,” he says, tongue stumbling over the words that describe the crime that she already knows. “And he—killed dozens of them. And he made others kill my friends. He made me a—” Shiro shakes his head, his fingers tightening around her hand. “And he would have hurt you. More. So. Thank you.”

She stares at him. She is confused and not mentally equipped to deal with this conversation; not on top of the raw ache in her chest, the reopened pain of her Shiro’s death. She says, “But he might have had information about Matt and the others.”

“I don’t care,” he says, and barks out a laugh, covering his face with his other hand. “Maybe I should. Maybe I will, later. But I’m just. Glad. I’m glad he’s dead. I should have done it. I should have killed him as soon as I had the chance. And I’m so sorry I didn’t. If I had, he wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have taken you—and I thought—”

He shakes his head, biting the words off. She can see little of his face, beyond the muscle jumping in his jaw. She says, because she does not like to see him this way, it hurts her, “Ensuring his death was not your responsibility.”

He laughs again, dry and cracking. “Wasn’t it? He stabbed you. You died, Allura. You were dead. If—” He tilts his head down, taking his hand off of hers, scrubbing at his face with both hands before he drops them to his lap. “I thought I lost you,” he says, looking at her with his expression open and terrible.

And this is, abruptly, not the conversation they were having. She stares at him, her heart jumping to a higher gear behind her ribs. She asks, “Lost me?”

One side of his mouth twitches. His eyes are soft and sad. “I know. You’re not mine. But I…” He looks away and makes a pained sound. “It didn’t—I just. I thought I did. And then I thought we—I thought you lost the baby.”

The world crystalizes, starting in the middle of Allura’s skull and moving outward with terrible speed. She can’t— _He_ can’t— She says, her voice small and far away, “You know?”

“I know,” he says. She should have known he would find out. Everyone else on the ship knows. They have shown they have no ability to keep a secret. It does nothing to relieve the sting that they would not respect her privacy. “Why didn’t—why didn’t you tell me?” The question sounds like it was dug up from his gut, like it is lined with razorblades that tear through every cell in his throat.

Allura stares forward, thoughts of which one of them told him falling to the side. It doesn’t matter. None of it does. Maybe none of it ever did. She stands, needing to not be on the bed, to not have him so close and warm. He grabs her wrist before she can step away, not roughly, and grits out, “Allura, please.”

She does not pull free of his touch. She turns to look at the door, wishing it was much closer. But perhaps she will have to speak about this, sooner or later. Perhaps she is too tired to keep avoiding it. She sighs and shrugs. His fingers are warm around her wrist. Familiar. Not. She offers, as an explanation, the only explanation she has, “I didn’t tell _him_.”

#

Allura’s words hang in the air, timed explosions that take a moment to detonate. They hit under Shiro’s ribs, in the soft spaces around his heart. It was not the answer he prepared for, not the one he expected her to give. He thought she would tell him it was not his business. He says, though the words were easy to understand, “What?”

Allura stares away from him. Her arm hangs limp in his grip, but he can feel her pulse racing under her skin. She says, dreamy, “I was about to, but we were called to battle, and I never got to tell him. He died without knowing. And I—I—would he be alive, still, if I had told him? Is it my fault he died? If I had just told him, maybe he wouldn’t have, have went to die, maybe—” She cuts off, her shoulders shaking, her fingers curling up towards her palm.

Shiro stands, her pain too obvious to ignore, cutting through even the numb shock in his head. He does not know where to touch her, or if he should touch her at all. She requires comfort, but he doesn’t know how to offer it, beyond standing beside her and telling her, “He would have.”

She flinches and says, her voice thickened, “You don’t know that.”

If nothing else, Shiro feels that they have established that the other Shiro made nearly every decision Shiro would have, once the Galra’s control over him broke. Shiro did not want to accept it, but there is no way around it. The other Shiro was a copy, not just of Shiro’s genetic code, but of all his memories. Those memories informed all his decisions. 

And Shiro knows what choice he would have made, to save so many lives, to keep Allura from doing it, to protect her. If he knew there was to be a child as well… He shivers. It would have made the decision easier, not harder. He says only, “I think I have a pretty good idea.”

Allura shakes her head. She tugs against his hold, and he does not try to tighten his grip. He lets her go. She gives him her back, arms wrapping around her chest. She says, “No. You don’t—You’re not him.”

Shiro winces. He knows. But he also has a clear grasp about how small that distinction really is. “I—”

She cuts him off, the words sharp and bitten out, “ _No_. _He_ loved me.”

Shiro exhales hard, the air driven out of his lungs. He sees her as she laid in his arms, bleeding out all over him, as she looked when the Galra swarmed around her so long ago, as she looked when she woke from her long sleep. “Allura,” he says, around the shards of ice in his throat. Looking at her hurts, but looking away feels impossible. He licks his dry lips and almost touches her shoulder. “Allura, you know have to know I—”

She makes a terrible sound, shaking her head, as her shoulders curl in, her arms cradling her ribs. He almost stops. But. But she needs to know. She needs to understand. He does not see how holding the words in any longer will ease the tremble in her skin.

So he braces like he’s expecting a blow and says, “I love you.” She shakes her head again, hard. Her fingers curl like claws into the sides of her nightdress. “I loved you before I got lost,” he continues, dogged, desperate to get the words out, now that he has started. Whatever she does with them, afterwards, at least they will not only be knotted in his head. She can decide how to respond. “I loved you the first time I saw you, I—”

“Everyone!” Pidge’s voice comes through the comms, loud and so startling that Shiro flinches. Not _now_ , she can’t really be interrupting them _right now_. He wants to strangle her, very briefly. “Everyone get to the bridge! We’ve got an emergency.”

Shiro swears, low and sharp. He wants to pretend that maybe it won’t be important, that maybe it can wait. But he can’t bring himself to. Allura steps forward, bending to grab the dress still laid out at the foot of the bed.

Shiro says, “Allura,” not knowing how to go on, what he wants to say.

She looks up at him, and he cannot read the emotion in her eyes. She says, her voice hoarse, “I will see you on the bridge.” And then she turns, and steps into the bathroom.

He growls, dragging a hand through his hair, wishing, abruptly, for something to punch. He hits the side of the doorframe as he passes through, and the burst of violence doesn’t do anything to mitigate the tension crawling up the back of his neck.

He hopes that Pidge’s emergency is going to require a fight.

#

Shiro finds the others on the bridge, gathered around the center console. Keith is noticeably absent. Maybe they put him in a pod. He looked like he needed it. “Where’s Allura?” Hunk asks, like he fully expects Shiro to know.

“Weren’t you wearing that yesterday?” Lance adds, narrowing his eyes and nudging Hunk in the side.

“I’m sure she’ll be here soon,” Shiro says, ignoring Lance’s question. They all wear the same clothes nearly all the time. They don’t have a lot of options. And Pidge said it was an emergency. Allura does arrive moments later, properly dressed. Her gown covers almost all the injuries she bears. The high neckline even hides the ligation marks around her throat. If not for the bruises and cuts on her face, there would be no visible evidence of what Lotor did.

“Alright,” she says, cutting him a quick look, “what’s the emergency?” She stands at her station, closer to him than he expected. His words echo back in his ears, and they feel dreamlike. Did he really just tell her he loved her? Did he really drop that on her? Did it really somehow seem like a good idea?

“This,” Pidge says, before Shiro can crawl out of his skin. She waves a hand and brings up a star map. It is familiar. “This is where we think Lotor’s base is, based on the telemetry we got when they tried locating him,” she says, and pinches her fingers together, zooming the map out, revealing a massive fleet closing in on the area. “And _this_ is a Galra fleet.”

“Reinforcements?” Hunk asks, fidgeting.

“Maybe.” Shiro says, scowling at the map, the morning’s fraught conversation temporarily pushed out of his thoughts.

Allura says, leaning forward, “They don’t look like reinforcements. Do not forget, we received reports that Zarkon was not pleased with Lotor’s actions from the Blade, some time ago. And these ships are in a standard Galra attack formation.”

“Wait. So, you think he found the base, too?” Lance asks, his fingers twirling Mrril’s bracelet. “And that he’s going to, what, smack Lotor around?”

Pidge nods. “Actually, I think that’s a good possibility. They don’t look friendly. And if he is going there for a fight, and _if_ our friends are there….” She leans back, the rest of that scenario playing out behind Shiro’s eyes.

“Quiznak,” Lance says, with feeling.

“Succinctly put,” Allura says, her voice dry. “How long do we have before the fleet reaches the base?”

“Perhaps a varga,” Coran says. He is drifting steadily closer and closer to Allura, concern written all over his expression. “Maybe a little more or a little less.”

“We have to go there,” Pidge says, her eyes glued to the base. “Now. If our people are there, if there’s even a chance….”

There is a beat of silence, and then Hunk says, “Not that I disagree, because I don’t, I definitely support getting out people out before the other Galra show up and blow up the base, or whatever. But, how are we going to do it? I mean. Keith is—he got shot. Twice. He’s not piloting Red. Can Allura?”

Keith chooses then to limp through the door; he’s always had a good sense of timing. “Like hell I’m not,” he says, bracing a hand against the nearest steady point, which happens to be Hunk. 

Shiro winces. “Keith—”

“I’m going,” Keith says, like he isn’t bone pale, like they can’t all see the bandages on his neck. “I spent the night in a pod. Coran said that even with activity the risk of a hemorrhage is very low. I can do it.”

“I’m game, too,” says Huirice. It is the first time she’s spoken. She stands towards one wall, carefully keeping her gaze on the star map. Shiro cannot fault her avoidance. He does not want to look at her, either. She… she kept his clone from attempting to kidnap Allura, again. But Shiro could have handled the clone and taken him alive. They could have questioned him.

Maybe they could have broken the Galra’s control.

Now, they’ll never know. He’s dead. Just like the dozens of clones Lotor killed. Shiro grits his teeth.

“We might not need a frontal assault with Voltron,” Allura says. She is also staring fixedly at the star map, her arms crossed. "We have Lotor’s ship in the hangar. Can it still fly?”

“I mean… maybe? Black was pretty careful with it,” Pidge says, she looks intrigued by the idea. “Hunk and I would have to give it another look.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lance says, waving his hands back and forth. “Are we thinking about sneaking onto another station? Is that what we’re talking about, right now? Because, I mean.” He looks at Allura and then quickly away. “Our record with that is just. It’s really bad. So bad. I don’t want to do it again.”

“Would you rather face this fleet?” Allura asks.

Lance blinks and then, after a moment, nods. “You know,” he says, “I think I would.”

“Lotor is dead,” Keith says. “Sneaking onto the base won’t be as dangerous this time.”

“Are we ignoring his generals? Are we just deciding they’re not huge threats because Lotor died?” Hunk asks. “Because I remember them being really threatening. And now they’re probably going to be really mad. At us.”

Allura sighs. “They’ll be distracted by the fleet. If we time it properly, we could get in and out while they fight each other. And, if not… Well. We still _have_ Voltron. We can fight if we need to.”

There is a moment of silence, and then Shiro nods, seizing the plan before it can veer into madness. “She’s right. A few of us can go in the shuttle and look for the others. Me, Pidge, and Lance, maybe. Any more, and we won’t have room to rescue anyone. Hopefully they’ll be too busy killing each other to even see us. But, if things go wrong, Allura can bring the Castle and Lions in with a wormhole.”

Allura’s gaze snaps over to him. She says, “I should go with you.”

He knew the suggestion was coming. He knows her. That forewarning does nothing to diminish the way his ribs tighten, or the sourness in his stomach. He can still feel her in his arms, in the moment where she went limp. He shakes his head. “No. Not this time. We need the Castle and Voltron to stay out of range, or the plan falls apart. You have to stay here.”

“Coran can bring the ship,” she says, staring at him, her jaw tilted up and set, her expression determined and beautiful.

“I can’t, Princess,” Coran says. “There isn’t enough of your energy stored in the system. I’m sorry.” Shiro wonders if Coran is lying. It is not something he would have suspected a few months ago. Now…

“I cannot stay back while you endanger yourself,” she says, and she is still looking at Shiro, holding his gaze. He cannot look away from her. He wonders if she realizes exactly what she said. He wonders if she meant it the way it sounded.

“You won’t,” he says, because he knows her well enough to know that asking that of her would be unreasonable and foolish. “If this turns into a fight, we’re going to need you there as soon as possible.”

Allura frowns. “I don’t like this,” she says.

A smile rises, unbidden, to his mouth. He says, “I know.”

She stares. It is the longest she has held his gaze in so long. He can see the conflict in her eyes. And then she nods, swallowing. “Very well,” she says. “If we are going to attempt this, we will need to hurry. Pidge, Hunk, I recommend you go find out if the shuttle will even work. The rest of you should prepare. I will ensure we’re ready here.”

#

Hunk and Pidge determine that the shuttle will fly. Allura does not ask what they did with the bodies that were in it. She hopes they tossed Lotor’s into space, where it could float, whatever spirit it might have been home to lost in the blackness between the stars for all eternity. She does not know what to hope for in regards to the clone.

He saved her when he had no reason to. He betrayed Lotor, after being programmed to obey. But he would have taken her from the Castle against her will. His eyes were cold. He was not the man she loved, or the man she—or the Shiro who has returned to them.

She does not know how to feel about it. Or about Huirice, who she sees briefly during the preparations for battle. The Galra woman visits the bridge, looking around at the stations and the star maps as Allura plots possible wormhole points and monitors the Galra fleet. Allura has only hazy memories of Huirice standing in the hangar, her gun drawn. She knows Huirice shot the clone, sparing Allura from whatever he planned.

Killing him.

The knowledge sets Allura’s teeth on edge.

“So, we’re really going to get the others back?” Huirice asks, drifting from one station to the next. She is wearing clothes that Hunk picked up somewhere or another. They do not quite fit her.

“We are,” Allura says, a stiffness in her tone that she does not know how to mitigate. She looks at Huirice and sees the surprise on the clone’s face, and the blankness in her Shiro’s eyes when he stopped fighting to draw a breath.

“I want to go along,” Huirice says, frowning up at the images of the Galra fleet.

Allura wishes she would leave. She makes Allura feel unsettled. But that is not helpful. Allura says, “Shiro is right. There isn’t room for all of us to go on the mission.”

“Hm.” Huirice resumes pacing. Allura tries to work around her presence. “You say his name, now.”

Allura keeps her attention focused on the calculations necessary for a wormhole. She will not think about the previous night. She says, “I suppose.” She can feel Huirice watching her.

“You could be screaming it,” Huirice says, and Allura chokes, jerking to look at her.

“Excuse me?”

Huirice shrugs. “We’re in the middle of a war,” she says. “We’re all of us ticks away from dying, all the time. And I see how you look at him. You dislocated my shoulder for threatening him. The gods and anyone with eyes know how he is about you. You should take advantage of what happiness you have a chance to grab.”

Allura narrows her eyes. She says, trying not to think of the way she woke up, of the conversation that started her quintant, “It is not that simple.”

Huirice raises an eyebrow. She has a good face for it, especially with the new scar over her left eye. She says, “It really is. You want complicated, try to talk to the yellow one.” Allura blinks, and Huirice shakes her head. “Think about it,” she says, and walks off of the bridge.

They have less than twenty doboshes until the Galra fleet reaches Lotor’s possible base.

Allura does not have time to think about it, but her mind turns it over and over nonetheless. 

The doboshes dwindle, and she finds herself shifting uneasily. It will be time for the mission soon, and she feels... she feels that she should go and offer a goodbye. It is what she has always done for those she—well.

She always sent her father on his way. And she always sent her Shiro off to battle. It is—it only felt right.

There has been a part of her tempted to do the same for the Shiro who returned to them, every time he went on a mission without her. But she had shoved it down, pushed it into a hard rock in the pit of her gut and ignored it.

That had been possible, when she did not have to think about him. When she did not know what he felt. Now…

He says he loves her. She does not know how to deal with that, or even if she can. She is not sure accepting it would provide the happiness that Huirice seems to think it would. He could die. They are in a war with a force that outmatches them in nearly every way. He could die at any point. He could die on this mission and—

And she freezes, all thoughts of calculations falling from her mind as cold panic gouges into the space within her ribs.

He could die, with his confession hanging between them, unacknowledged. He could die.

She steps back away from her station and turns on her heel, not thinking, driven by the pounding of her pulse in her ears more than anything else.

#

Shiro gets conscripted into helping patch up Lotor’s shuttle. He appreciates the work. It keeps his mind off of the conversation that started the day and his admission, still hanging between them without comment. “What did you… do with the bodies?” he asks, when he first walks into the shuttle. There is a dark stain where his clone fell.

“They’re, um, in the infirmary?” Hunk says, looking up from where a console seems to have thrown up wires all over him. “We didn’t know what else to do with them. Coran told us to space Lotor, but that seemed… I don’t know. Weird. And we didn’t know if we should cremate the… other one. So.”

“Right,” Shiro says. They’ll have to take care of that. They can do it later. After the battle. Which is approaching quickly. Pidge helpfully set up a countdown, and it chimes softly every minute they get closer to the deadline. 

“Are you sure you should be coming along?” Pidge asks, without looking away from the screen she’s working on. “You said Huirice was… upset about you, when she woke up. The other survivors, they might be… You know.”

Shiro grimaces. It’s a thought he’s already turned over. “Yeah,” he says, “They might be. But I know how the Galra keep their prisoners. I need to be there.” Like hell is he sending Pidge and Lance into a Galra base while it’s under attack by themselves. “We’ll just have to handle it, if they’re… upset.”

Pidge nods, though she does not look exactly satisfied. He wonders if she’s push harder about it if they were rescuing someone besides Matt.

Time runs down and down and down. Until they have none of it left. Until Hunk clears out, and Lance joins them. Until Lance clears his throat and nudges Shiro in the ribs, nodding towards the end of the shuttle’s ramp, where Allura stands. She wears her Paladin uniform, though he hopes she will not need to charge in to rescue them. He is not foolish enough to discount the possibility.

She looks breathless. “I came to wish you luck,” she says, and Lance pushes Shiro in the back, before bolting towards the cockpit, snagging Pidge on the way.

Shiro shakes his head, walking down the ramp. He has no idea what the others are thinking, half the time. He says, “Thank you,” and it feels trite, and foolish, but he does not know what else to say. He wonders if he is standing too close. He thinks about holding her the previous night. His confession hangs around his ears, burning hot.

“Shiro…” she starts, and then stops, grimacing. He watches her fingers curl, before she lifts her chin and takes a deep breath.

She touches his cheek, staring at her fingers against his skin like they hold the secrets to the universe. He wonders if she is thinking of scars he does not have. He says, quiet, “Allura?”

Her gaze shifts to his eyes, and there is something sad and deep and wild in her expression. She slides her fingers, curling them at the back of his neck, exerting the barest amount of pressure as she stretches onto her toes.

He shivers, the world narrowing to the space around the two of them. He leans down, drawn by some force that overpowers gravity. His breath catches, snagged when her mouth brushes his. The kiss is a soft thing. She watches him through it, her eyes wild and wide, and when she sinks back his lips tingle, his thoughts completely derailed.

She says, her hand still pressed against his cheek, “Come back to me.” The words sound like an incantation.

There are galaxies in her eyes. He can still feel the press of her mouth. He says, “I will,” and steps back, because if he does not, he will not leave at all. 

#

Allura opens a wormhole for them, far enough away from Lotor’s base and the Galra fleet that they should not be immediately noticed. “Wait,” Lance says, once they have passed through the wormhole. Shiro’s chest still hums from Allura’s touch. “Wait, what are we going to do if they want to talk to us?”

Shiro stares across at him. “One of my clones was piloting this,” he points out. It is such a strange thing to say. “So just let me do the talking and we should be fine.”

“So, you’re going to pretend to be a copy of you?” Lance sounds skeptical.

“If necessary.” This seems fairly easy to understand. How hard can it be to pretend to be someone just like him?

“What if they ask you questions?” Lance demands, vibrating with unspent energy.

“I’ll answer them,” Shiro says, cutting Lance a sharp look when he opens his mouth again. “But I don’t think they’re going to care about us. Look.”

The shuttle’s sensors pick up the arrival of the Galra fleet. And they are just close enough to see the flashes of explosions that start almost immediately around the station. “Holy Kaltenecker,” Pidge says, leaning forward, bracing one hand on the controls. “They’re actually doing it. They’re actually attacking each other.” And then she turns and looks at Shiro, eyes wide. “We have to hurry.”

“Understood,” Shiro says, and takes them in. No one asks them anything as they approach. Lotor’s people obviously have bigger problems than one shuttle that isn’t firing at them.

#

Allura watches the shuttle disappear through the wormhole. It takes her heart with it. She wants so badly to throw the Castle through after the others, but the plan as it stands is sound. They need the Lions ready and available, but not immediately present. Hunk and Keith are already down in Red and Yellow, ready to spring into action if needed. And she is the only one who can bring them in, if necessary. 

But listening to the others chatter and worry over the comm line does her no favors. Every time Shiro speaks it twists a knife in her ribs.

She does not know if she should have gone to him. Perhaps it was a mistake. 

She had not planned to kiss him. But looking up into his face, into his dark eyes, it had seemed the only way forward. Perhaps Huirice planted the idea in her head. Perhaps she simply gave in to a moment of weakness. In any case, she cannot take it back. Nor can she waste further time thinking about it. 

The Galra fleet crashes against the station as the shuttle reaches it. Allura curls her hands around the Castle’s controls, gritting her teeth and wishing them luck. It is all she can do at the moment. And she hates it. She should be there.

#

Shiro’s crew finds a shuttle bay that is already damaged, and Shiro lands the shuttle among the wreckage they find inside. The main Galra forces are moving more quickly than they were counting on. Lotor’s people aren’t putting up the fight they should be. The base seems already half-abandoned. Maybe they saw the Galra fleet coming and left.

“We need to move quickly,” Shiro says, as the others file out of the shuttle, bayards in hand, their expressions set and grim. “Pidge, see if you can get us some information about where we need to go.”

She nods, already moving towards the hangar wall, where a panel blinks warnings about fires and hull breaches. Shiro and Lance stand at her back, guard up, waiting. Sirens wail outside of the hangar, and the air smells of burnt circuitry. Every few moments another explosion rocks the station.

Pidge gives a wordless cheer, dancing back and forth in place. “I think,” she says, “I think I found them. I think this is them.” She points at a glowing point on the panel, across the station from where they are.

“Great,” Shiro says. “Let’s go. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Wait,” she says, frowning and leaning closer. “Just a minute. The schematics are really weird. There’s something strange. It’s like there’s… a locked area, or something. Something they’re trying to hide.”

“Do you think our people are there?” Lance asks, his gun tucked in against his shoulder.

“No, but I—it’s saying something about some kind of project, we should—”

“We don’t have time for it right now, if it doesn’t have to do with our people,” Shiro decides. He has a bad feeling about it, anyway, burrowing down through the bottom of his stomach. “Whatever it is, I think the Galra are going to take care of it for us. This station isn’t going to last much longer. Let’s get to the others while we can.”

Pidge frowns, but then jerks out a nod, waving a hand across the screen to clear it. “Right,” she says. “Let’s go.”

#

They come upon soldiers in the hall, some Galra, some not. Most of them are panicking, though a few move like they have some kind of purpose. None of them are happy to see Shiro’s group. Shiro puts them down hard and fast, attempting to silence them before they can comm for help. Shiro is not sure it matters. It doesn’t look like the station has the resources available to worry about them.

But the Galra attacking it might.

If Zarkon is out there, somewhere, he’d probably be very interested in knowing a few Paladins were running around outside of their Lions. It’s better for everyone if he doesn’t pick up any chatter about that.

Pidge leads them down one passage after another, before finally waving them to a stop at a corner. Shiro risks a look around. Two guards stand outside a closed door, everything in their posture screaming how little they want to be there. The hall is half-full of acrid smoke. The alarms in this section of the station are malfunctioning, blaring out of rhythm and whining at random volumes.

“Lance,” Shiro says, quietly. “Two shots.”

Lance hums an answer, and Shiro steps out of his way. Mrril’s beads shift when Lance raises his gun, taking a deep breath before bending around the corner. He squeezes the trigger twice. There are two soft thumps. Pidge is already moving.

She steps over one of the guards, reaching for the control panel by the door. “Come on, come on,” she murmurs. The door cracks open a fraction, hesitates, and then slides open far enough for Matt to jerk through, his fists up and his expression grim, before he recognizes Pidge and everything in him shifts.

He blurts, “Katie?” And she grabs him, her laughter punch-drunk and shaky. Matt’s hair is filthy and the patchy beard that’s grown in across his cheeks only hides some of the gauntness of his face. They were fed, but not enough. There is a bruise covering most of the left side of his face, and he holds himself like his ribs hurt. Shiro’s jaw twitches.

Behind them, Lance is pushing through the doors, calling, “Mrril? Mrr—”

He goes sideways, all four of Mrril’s arms wrapping around him, her legs going around his waist.

Shiro wishes he could give them longer to celebrate, but he can’t. Someone needs to keep them on track. This station is not going to hold together much longer. “How many made it?” he asks, and Matt looks up from where he holds Pidge tight. And his expression shuts down, pupils shrinking as his skin goes bone pale.

Matt shoves Pidge back, his hands shaking as he barks, “Stay away! Katie, run! I’ll slow him down!”

“Matt,” Pidge says, grabbing his arm. “Matt—stop, it’s not, it’s—”

Matt pushes her, hard, Shiro too frozen in place to do anything. He’d known they might have to face this. He’d known. Knowing doesn’t make it easier. He’s had enough of his friends looking at him like they know he’s about to kill them and that they’ve already accepted that there’s nothing, really, they can do to stop him. “It’s a trick,” Matt says, “it’s not—he’s on _their_ side, he’s—”

“He’s not!” Pidge snaps, and when Matt makes a broken, beaten sound, she grabs his collar and yanks him around. “He’s not! There are—there are clones, okay? The Galra cloned him. And the clones are—they’re programmed to help the Galra, but he’s—he’s not, okay? He’s on our side. I promise you.”

“That’s crazy,” Matt says. His shaking is worse. Pidge grunts, softly, taking his weight as he leans on her. “That’s—no. That’s nuts.”

“It’s true,” Lance says, where he is holding Mrril and two other members of the Fist back. “Look, you can freak out about it later. This place is about to go boom, right? We need to get the quiznak out.”

“We can’t go with him,” Mrril says, trying to push Lance away and hold him close at the same time, as though her arms can’t agree on the best course of action. “He’s—I saw—he killed—”

“No,” Lance interrupts, “ _he_ didn’t. Look, it—shit! Look, just _trust_ me, okay? Let us get you out of here before this entire place explodes, and then you can freak out all you want.” Mrril looks away from Shiro, finally, turning her huge purple eyes towards Lance. For a moment no one moves or speaks, and then she nods. 

“Alright,” she says. 

“Let’s go,” Pidge says, pulling Matt along. Shiro does not move to help. He gets the distinct feeling it would only make things worse. Rother and Enir, the last two survivors, exit the room leaning on one another, shrinking together. Shiro grits his teeth, and moves to the front of the line. He doesn’t think anyone wants him at their backs.

#

The station has deteriorated while they lingered. They discover how badly when they reach a hallway that was open moments ago and find it completely blocked with crushed metal.

“Well,” Lance says, “that’s not good.”

“I think I can remember a way around,” Pidge says. “This way, hurry.” She has Matt’s arm over her shoulder, bent a little under his weight. Shiro wishes the world were sane, that he could just carry their injured out of here. He thinks they’d scream if he touched them.

They don’t pass any guards or soldiers. The station may have been abandoned, or everyone could be out fighting the Galra fleet. Either way, they move quickly, though the explosions that rock the station back and forth make things difficult. 

They have to adjust their course constantly, making detours around fires and collapsed metal, but Pidge’s expression never wavers. Not until they have to scramble down an elevator shaft into a lower level, and are met with near darkness. The sirens are silent on this level. It smells strange, of chemicals and antiseptic. Pidge hesitates at the bottom of the shaft. She says, “This shouldn’t be here. This should be… we should be back in the hall that leads to the hangar.”

The hairs on the back of Shiro’s neck rise. He flexes the bayard’s fingers, and it glows more brightly, offering some illumination to the tunnel. Oily smoke hangs near the ceiling, and a strange purplish mist curls around their ankles. 

“Do you think this’ll still get us closer?” Lance asks, as Shiro takes a step forward, drawn by a sick sense of dread. Something terrible is here. It presses at him from all sides. “Or should we go back? Hey, wait, Shiro, where are you going?”

“Wait here,” Shiro says. He has—something about this place is familiar. The smell of it, maybe. Not the physical location itself. But the smell. He knows this smell. It makes his missing limb throb with agony. For a second, he clearly remembers the ruin of his arm, the protrusion of bone through flesh, the way his skin hung down in thick strips, the glisten of veins as they slid around like worms, spilling so much blood that—

He grits his teeth against the vomit rising in his throat. The hall is short. It ends in a large, dark room. Shiro stands at the threshold, breathing too fast. His hindbrain insists that he turn around and run back to the others, climb the elevator shaft, leave this place.

He raises his bayard, instead, the light brightening, driving back the shadows that fill the air.

And he cries out, unable to catch the sound back.

#

Allura tracks the team’s progress through their hushed voices over the comm. She should be there. She should have never agreed to stay behind. But it is too late to do anything about that, now. She can only listen to them navigate the station while she watches the Galra fleet methodically decimate Lotor’s forces.

The forces around the station fall more quickly than Allura anticipated. It look as though some portion of them switch sides almost immediately, turning on their own people. Others flee. She thinks she spots the comet-ship, darting off early in the battle. Allura does not know what to make of that, but it worries her.

The Galra fleet turns too quickly to the station proper, leveling attack after attack on it. It will be destroyed, sooner rather than later.

“We should go there now,” Huirice says, where she lingers on the bridge, watching the battle play out from a distance that feels eerie and wrong.

Allura listens to Pidge report on the group’s progress, as they pick their way through the failing station. She says, her fingers curled around the Castle’s controls, “Not yet.”

Not yet. Because if they jump in, it will be too easy for the Galra to figure out why they have come. They would put too much at risk. But, oh, how she itches to go. Staying in place is one of the more difficult things she has ever done.

But she pushes down the energy required to open the wormhole, staring ahead. And she waits, grinding her teeth together, until the last of the Lotor’s pitiful defensive ships is lanced through, and the Galra fleet turns all of its weapons on the station.

“Princess,” Keith says, tense, from Red.

“I see it,” Allura says. The plan was to wait until the shuttle squad sent word that they were ready for evacuation. But the station shakes under the assault. The Castle’s instruments are quick to inform her that the station will be destroyed completely after only a few more attacks of such force.

And she will not stay here and watch them perish. That determination crystalizes inside of her. He loves her. And she—she does not know how to untangle her emotions, but she will not let him die.

She will not even risk it. 

“Shuttle team,” she says, feeding her energy down into the wormhole. “We are inbound. Please prepare for immediate extraction.” The fleet is too big for the Castle to stand against, it is too well armed for them to handle in their injured, weakened states.

She gets no reply. Over the comm, someone is yelling at Shiro. She does not know why. She does not have time to ask.

Another coordinated attack is loosed on the station, but they are already inbound by then. “Brace yourselves!” Allura orders, taking her own advice as they slide across the shortcut in space, right between the station and the oncoming attack.

It hits hard.

She strangles a cry off in her throat, clinging to the controls to stay upright as the shields tremble around the Castle. The feedback of the attack throbs in her nerves, and she breathes it out, the way she was taught, ensuring the shields stay strong and stable, even as she calls, “We are outside of the station. Shuttle team, what is your status?”

She gets no answer.

“Keith, Hunk,” she says, adrenaline spiking in her blood. What if they are already too late? What if she delayed too long? “We need you out there!”

“Already on it!” Keith calls back. “The other Lions took off, too.”

Allura wonders if that should worry or relieve her.

#

“Shiro!” Pidge calls, “Shiro, are you okay? Is—shit! Stay here!” He hears her footsteps approaching, but he can’t do anything about it. He takes an unsteady step forward, his heart jackhammering in his chest. “Shiro, what’s—oh, my God.” He hears the horror in her voice.

So she can see it too. It’s not just Shiro’s imagination.

Half of the gigantic room is collapsed, filled with rubble and broken glass. There is a strange liquid underfoot, spilled from somewhere. There is an arm, a familiar arm, sticking out of the rubble. And there are… tubes. Standing at the far end of the room. Undamaged. They are full of a strange, purplish liquid. And bodies. _His_ body. Repeated over and over and over again. They are wearing masks and nothing else, floating in the fluid with their eyes closed. Their hair is long. Some have white streaks in the front. Others do not. Some have scars, the scars he knows from the way they ache and pull. Some don’t.

Shiro presses a hand to icy glass and does not remember how he crossed the room. On the other side, another him floats, loose-limbed, scarless.

Pidge makes a terrible sound, and Shiro tries to look towards her, but he cannot stop looking at the mask over his face. He cannot help noticing that his chest is not moving. Not at all.

“I’m sorry,” Pidge says, from somewhere very far away. “I don’t—this place lost power. Early in the attack, I think. The pods are—they stopped working—there’s—”

“Are they dead?” Shiro asks, though he already knows the answer.

Pidge tells him, “I’m sorry.”

“What’s taking—oh, no.” That’s Lance. 

“Allura says we need to get out of here, she’s waiting on us,” Pidge says. Shiro knows she’s right. He thinks he heard Allura, a moment ago. But. He looks to the side. There are little rooms, off of the side of the main room that isn’t in ruins. He walks towards one door and, when it does not open, he digs in the fingers of his bayard and rips it off.

Empty.

There is a little cot in one corner. A bucket in another. A worn blanket lays in the middle of the floor.

“Shiro, man,” Lance says, close by. “I think we should go. I think we should go _right now_.”

Shiro moves to the next door. It is a near mirror image of the first. There is a stain on the mattress. 

“Allura,” Pidge says, “can you—we found, we found, uh, the cloning facility, I think. Where they—you know. Shiro is, he’s not—can you—we need to go, and he’s not—”

Shiro opens another door. It is nicer. Medical equipment lines one wall, all dark now. There is a bed, instead of a cot. Someone is in it. Lance grabs Shiro’s arm, and Shiro shrugs him off, walking over, looking down.

Someone with his face lays there. Wires stretches from his head over to some machine. Tubes are stuck in his flesh arm. His chest is rising and falling, shallow.

Shiro’s comm crackles in his ear. “Shiro,” Allura says, her voice a beacon, a sudden light, an anchor dragging his mind back to his bones and flesh. “Shiro, can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he says, because she asked. He pulls wires off of the man who has his face. He reaches for the tubes and yanks. 

“Good,” Allura says. He hopes she keeps talking to him. “I cannot hold back the attack for much longer. I need you to get off of that station. It is moments away from breaking apart completely. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” Of course he will, if she wants him to. He bends, first, and lifts the man on the bed, settling him over his shoulders.

“Good,” she says, again. “I have your location. You need to—ah!” For a moment the comm goes to static, and he blinks, the world jerking back into focus. He had not even realized that he felt like he was watching his body from the outside, until he no longer is. He can hear explosions over the comm. His heartrate spikes higher. He shouts, “Allura!”

“We’re alright!” she shouts back, and his mind scrambles to catch up to the time he spent dim and distant. She is _in the fight_. She wormholed the Castle in. She must have. “But you _must_ get off of the station. We will keep them from destroying it for as long as we can.”

He is already moving. Pidge gapes at the man over his shoulders, but they don’t have the time for an explanation. “You said the hangar should have been through here, right?” Shiro asks, walking towards the tanks, his blood sizzling in his veins.

“According to the schematics,” she says, “but—”

Shiro shoves one of the tanks, needing to get to the back wall. The glass cracks on the second shove, and someone behind him cries out. Purple fluid runs down over his legs when the tank shatters. The body slides out to the side. He can’t look at it, so he doesn’t.

The bayard glows hot and bright, and Shiro stabs it into the back of the tank, carving through. For a moment he thinks it will not work, that the wall will be too thick, that this will have been pointless…

And then smoke billows in through the hole he made. He grits his teeth and carves a passage out, ordering, “Come on.”

He does not look back to see if they follow him. He steps through, the metal around the edges of the passage terribly hot, and ends up in the hangar. It is full of smoke. Their shuttle is gone. _All_ of the shuttles that look remotely usable are gone.

Shiro feels something cold twist in his chest, and then it is crushed by a rush of determination and strength. He turns his head in time to see Black fly by the entrance to the hangar and circle back, dogged by three Galra fighters. The other Lions fly behind her.

He moves towards her.

#

Getting to Black involves jumping out into space, something that Shiro’s suit was built to handle. He is not so sure the man he’s carrying will survive it, but he will _definitely_ not survive staying on the station. So Shiro jumps. And Black catches him. And then there is no more time to think.

The Galra fleet has all but abandoned its attack on the station, which is too broken to do anything but fall apart, anyway. All of the Galra’s aggression has been turned over to the Castle, which is weathering the assault as explosions light up portions of the shield, over and over again.

“Hurry!” Allura says, her voice full of strain. “I’m not sure how much more of this we can take!”

The distance to the Castle is not far. But it is full of Galra fighters. Shiro settles the clone to one side of the cockpit and grips Black’s controls, intent on taking out as many fighters as he can on the way to the Castle. He is distantly aware of Yellow and Red flying around them, keeping a path open as the rest of them streak towards safety.

“Keith,” Pidge snaps, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Saving you,” Keith shouts back, a blast from Red cutting through a fighter that was harrying Green. “You’re welcome.”

And then they are back to the Castle. Black lands roughly, Shiro shouting, “We’re aboard,” before she even stops moving. “Get us out of here!”

“Gladly,” Allura says, her voice thick with pain.

A moment later, the explosions cease as they leave the fleet behind.

Shiro takes one breath, and then another. He peels his hands off of Black’s controls. And he looks over at the man laying by his seat.

For a moment, his heart stops again.

And Allura demands, over the comm, “Is everyone alright? Did we get everyone?”

“We did,” Pidge says. “And, um, someone extra.”

#

Shiro carries the other him to the infirmary. The man does not stir, not even when Shiro deposits him onto one of the beds. Allura rushes through the door as he is straightening; he sees her jerk to a sudden stop out of the corner of his eyes.

“He’s alive,” Shiro says, his voice strange and flat. It seems important that she knows that. “He was the only one I could find that was alive.”

And then everyone else is crowding into the room, rushing around Allura like she is a rock in the middle of a river. Lance carries Mrril over to one of the beds, and Matt hobbles in, leaning on Pidge. Hunk is carrying Rother. Huirice bears Enir. 

Coran brings up the rear, shoving his way through with what appears to be a judicious use of elbows. He says, “I need to know species to program the healing pods!”

“Human,” Shiro says, and Coran does a double take at the body on the bed, before his gaze jerks up to Shiro’s face.

“Is he… under Galra control?” Coran asks, already at one of the pods.

“I don’t know,” Shiro admits. “Probably.” He hadn’t thought about that, on the base. Or on the way back to the Castle. Not at all. He just—there were so many copies of him. So many bodies with his face. His scars. Potentially his memories. And they were all dead. He can’t—

“Well, we’ll keep him under guard,” Coran says, stepping back with a decisive nod. “Get him in, we don’t have all quintant.”

Shiro lifts the man with his face and carries him to the pod. His arm is bloody, where Shiro pulled the tubes out of him. His face is ashen. His hair is too long. The scar over his nose looks too fresh. “There we go,” Coran says, as the glass slides into place. “Now who’s next?”

Shiro takes a step back and then another, and another. He brushes past the tight knot of Huirice and Matt and the others, all clinging to one another. He bumps into the doorway. He keeps going, until he runs into the wall of the hallway, across from the infirmary. He considers turning on his heel and running, but his chest feels too tight for that. He curls his hands into fists, thumping his head back against the wall and trying to breathe. 

“Shiro?” Allura’s voice cuts through the noise in his skull. He blinks and finds her standing in the doorway to the infirmary, watching him. 

He tries to smile; it does not feel like he manages. He says, “Hey,” and his voice comes out as a rough, strangled thing.

Allura takes a step towards him, and then another, moving in a broken path to reach him. She stops in front of him, her face tilted up to search his expression. He wants to grab her, to bury his face in her hair and breathe there. He touches her hand, not sure if he should, not sure what is allowed, not sure about anything, but needing the steadiness he feels every time he touches her.

She hesitates and then turns her hand in his, weaving their fingers together, sending a shiver up his arm. “Shiro,” she says, quietly, her other hand touching his arm, and he touches her back, shocked by his own daring, even as she leans into him. Her arms encircle his shoulders, and he pulls her even closer. He presses his face down into her hair. He exhales shakily and draws in a breath that fills his lungs up all the way for the first time since he walked into that terrible, dark room.

She tilts her head, just a little, and he does not want her to draw back. He wants her closer. But she must be exhausted. And maybe this is too much. He presses a kiss against her forehead, loosening his arms, and feels her stiffen.

He has a heartbeat to realize what he’s done, before he realizes that she is not jerking away. Her arms remain around him. She raises her face, and her eyes are wide. Her lips are parted. It makes him bold. He bends and busses a kiss across her check, and then another, a breath closer to her mouth, and she turns into it, shifting it into a proper kiss.

After a moment, he leans back, a millimeter, a hairsbreadth, enough to see her. He asks, thick, not entirely sure how they got here, “Allura?” And she shifts, pressing up onto her toes, her mouth hot and soft and welcoming. He clutches her closer, unable to stop the sound in his throat. 

It is exactly what he needed.

#

Shiro kisses her like he’s been waiting forever, like he thought he would never get to, like he never wants to stop. His arms pull her close, pressing the uniform into her skin, a discomfort she does not even notice. He brings one hand up, his palm warm against her jaw, his fingers curling back into her hair as he shifts closer and closer still.

It is—familiar. And not. And for a moment her mind wants to catalogue the softness of his mouth, the way he tastes, the sounds he makes. She draws back, suddenly stung, memories laid too strongly over the present. She hoped this would be easier, but is not surprised that it is not.

He does not try to hold her, his hands sliding off of her when she takes a hurried step back. They stand there, in the hall. She looks to the side, too hot in her uniform. Her lips feel hypersensitive. She dares a look at him and finds he is staring at her, his eyes dark, color high in his cheeks.

She clears her throat, opens her mouth and shuts it again, unsure how to even begin. Everything had seemed so clear, earlier, during the battle, when Pidge called her to bring him back. Now everything seems covered in sharp angles. She does not know how to approach this conversation.

He says, with a wince she catches from the corner of her eye, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. This is—they cannot go on like this. It is madness. The one madness in their life that can be resolved. He needs to know the tangle of her thoughts, however little she wants to go down that road. She takes a deep breath. “We should… talk. Somewhere private.”

He nods, a grim look stealing the flush from his cheeks. 

#

In the end, Shiro follows her back to their unofficial room. It feels like they were last in it years ago. She sighs coming through the door, and unlatches the side of her chest armor, shrugging out of it with a little wince. She sets it to the side, and he follows suit after a moment, not sure what else do to with his hands.

He is considering going to shower off when she sighs again and turns towards him, her shoulders squared and her chin up, her hands folded tensely. She looks like she’s about to face a firing squad. His stomach clenches hard.

And she says, “I love you, too.” It freezes his limbs in place and drives the knowledge of how to breathe out of his head. His heart trips in his chest. “I cannot help it,” she says, the words rushing from her now, like blood from a laceration, “I tried. I tried. But Lotor was—he was going to kill you, and I could not, I cannot watch you die. I…” She shakes her head.

“Because of the… the other me?” Shiro asks, unsure what she is trying to tell him, unsure if he wants to know. He remembers the devastation on her face when she watched the clone die in the shuttle. Surely, that emotion could not have all been for a man she knew only a few moments. “Or because of me?”

“Yes,” she says, and laughs, short and sharp, her perfect posture dropping all at once. She digs her fingers into her hair, shaking the mass of it. Her voice quakes. “Yes, I don’t know. You were gone and he was here, and then he was gone and you came back, and I—I don’t know. How much of my love for him was for you? How much of what I feel now is for him?”

She looks up at him, then, and her eyes are too bright, her mouth twisted in a rictus of confusion and despair. She presses on, ragged, “I don’t—nothing makes sense! Huirice thinks it should be simple. She thinks I should just take you to bed! But how do I separate you from him? You tell me know you are so alike that you know what he would do in an impossible situation and—and I know. I know it’s true. But he—he—he burned out the Galra tech wrapped around his nerves to refuse their programming. He worried so much that he was not you. The _real_ you. That’s what he always said. He never believed he was—”

She stops then, to laugh softly, wetly. She stumbles back until she hits the mattress and sits down on it, hard. “He thought I would choose you over him, when you weren’t even there. If I… if I love you, aren’t I… aren’t I—” She falls silent, then, pressing her hands to her face while her shoulders shake.

He doesn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make it worse. But she’s bared too much for him to stay silent. He dares a step forward and another, until he is before her. He sinks to his knees. He does not know what else to do. He says, “Allura. It’s—look. Look, this is—I don’t think either of us expected to deal with this.”

She laughs, watery and short. It brings a crooked smile to his face. He touches one of her hands, not trying to pull it away from her face. It just seems the safest place to touch. “I don’t know the answer,” he says, “about what you feel, or who you feel it for, or… or anything.” He’s so glad their situations aren’t reversed.

“But,” he says, trying desperately to find the right words, “but I know I love you. When you died—I would have done anything to save you. I would have killed Lotor with my bare hands, if he’d—I—he wouldn’t have survived it.” He trails his fingers down her arm, swallowing hard. “I’m not sure I would have, either.”

If she died because of him—if they told him about the potential child—he does not know what he would have done. But it is easy to die in war.

She pulls her hands away from her face, finally. Her skin is wet, and her eyes are reddened. She says, “Don’t say that.”

He can only shake his head, reaching out to wipe away her tears. He hates seeing her cry. He hates that it keeps happening. She stares at him, undoing his work with each sweep of her eyelashes. Her gaze slides slowly, from his eyes to his cheek, to his neck, to his mouth, back to his eyes. He wonders if she is looking for someone else.

He swallows that worry, pushing her hair back, behind her ears. He finds, at last, what he has been trying to say all along. “Listen. What I’m trying to tell you is… I can wait. Until you figure out whatever you need to figure out. We don’t—we don’t have to rush. I love you. That’ll—that’s not going to go anywhere. It’s here. It’ll be here. When—if—you want it.”

She says, soft and thick, “Shiro.” Her eyes are so soft, her fingertips gentle when she traces the side of his face, the plane of his cheek. He turns into the touch, though he does not know if he should. It has been so long since—the softness of her touch, it is… Something inside of him craves it, needs it too much to stand against it.

She makes a tiny sound and cups his jaw with her other hand, sliding forward. She kisses him, and he tastes salt on her lips. He pulls her closer, his fingers tangled in her hair, glutting on the sweet mercy of her touch.

When she leans back, he aches to follow and holds back. She does not go far. His hands settle at her hips when she presses her forehead to his. She says, “We can—I can—” And she shifts against him, a promise in the drag of her hips, sadness still in the edges of her eyes.

He holds her still, because he _wants_ , but he does not want badly enough to rush blindly forward. Her grief is still so new. He can taste her tears in his mouth. He says, “I’d—when you’re ready. Okay? We don’t. We have time.”

She looks at him, her eyes close and her breath brushing against his cheeks. And then she nods, and kisses him once more, brief and sweet. “You’re injured,” she says, when she draws back, tracing the bruise on his face.

“It’s not bad,” he tells her. “You, on the other hand….” There has been no time to see to the injuries she took from Lotor. And he is grateful for the change of subject.

She winces. “I don’t want to go to the infirmary.” He supposes he would not either. Lotor’s corpse waits there. With the body of one of his clones. And a living clone floats in one of the pods. There’s nothing but pain there, for her.

“We should at least clean up,” he says. He is covered in dried sweat and that purple fluid from the clone’s tank. 

Allura nods with a sigh. She stands and offers him a hand to his feet, where they stand too close, or not close enough. Practical concerns stretch out before him. They need to get cleaned up. They need to see to their injuries, somehow. He needs to go talk to Matt and the others. They need to determine what is going on with Zarkon. There is a clone he’s going to have to do… something about.

Exhaustion settles sudden and heavy on his shoulders.

“I will shower,” she says, drawing him back from the myriad responsibilities dragging down on him. “And then… Would you.” She glances up at him, surety gone from her expression. “Would you stay? To sleep,” she adds, her ears staining red at the tips. “We have so much to do tomorrow. And I. It would be nice. To not be alone.”

He bends and kisses her forehead, again, closing his eyes and shivering for a moment. “Yes,” he says. “It would.”

In the end, she curls up against him, her hair still damp, her body warm from the hot water. She does not direct the way they lay together, this time, and he strokes his fingers down the bared curve of her arm, skirting finger-shaped bruises, following a curve of pink to the eye of her elbow. She shivers and reaches up to thread their fingers together, pressing the back of his hand against her ribs.

He feels the beating of her heart. He closes his eyes, her pulse a steady rhythm that sinks into his head. The rest of the war stretches out before him, beckoning for his attention and worry. But for one night, at least, he sleeps with no greater concern than holding her.

The future and whatever horrors it holds can wait for a few hours.

**Author's Note:**

> And there we go! I'm over on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/andtheblueberrymuffin) if you want more shallura stuff from me and/or to ask me questions/scream at me about this. I take prompts etc etc. Thanks for reading!


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